Have you ever wondered who exactly is selling you that Christmas tree?

Every year, as the air turns cold, seasonal workers flock to New York City street corners to help spread a little bit of holiday cheer — in the form of firs and frasers. These operations seem to pop up overnight and are often open around the clock, serving New Yorkers at whatever hour they’re free to buy a Christmas tree.

“Marketplace Morning Report” host Sabri Ben-Achour visited one in West Harlem just after midnight on a nondescript — but bitterly cold — weekday. That's where he met June Hagin, who works as Night Watch at one of these tree lots. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Sabri Ben-Achour: We’re here at Uptown Christmas Trees from Gopher Broke Farm, and Gopher is spelled like the little animal. I see that you've got the Christmas lights up. It's very festive. You have a little Santa’s workshop. Tell me about the trees you got.

June Hagin: Right now, we have Balsam firs here on this front rack, and on the back rack, we've got frasers. It was snowing earlier, and whenever you see a fraser, like in actual snow, it just looks like you're in a crazy, magical forest somewhere.

Ben-Achour: How much do these trees go for?

Hagin: That's a really loaded question. People come up to me all the time. Like, “How much are the trees?” I'm like, “Would you walk onto a car lot and be like, ‘How much is a car?’” It really depends on what you're looking for, you know.

Ben-Achour: I should say it is 12:30, 12:45, in the morning right now. It's 28 degrees. Who is buying trees right now? Why have you got to be here?

Hagin: You know, New York is a service industry town. It's a town with a lot of people who work overnight and work late nights, and they're buying Christmas trees too. You know, if they're getting off at 2 in the morning or 4 in the morning or 5. More than that, it's that we can't move this inventory. Someone's got to be here to keep an eye on it, to keep things clean. And if someone's going to be here, we may as well be open.

Ben-Achour: So it is actually freezing. You do have a small sort of, I see, it's called Santa's workshop — a small sort of, like, hut that, it's warmer in there?

Hagin: Yeah, it's cozy in there. If you want to step in, sure, go for it.

Ben-Achour: OK, this is actually a lot better.

Hagin: Yeah, no, I spend a fair amount of time in here on nights like this. But honestly, you know, it's a 12-hour, 14-hour shift sometimes, so you get tired, and if you spend your whole night in the cozy little box, you fall asleep, and that's no bueno.

Ben-Achour: Hour by hour, what does the night shift selling Christmas trees look like?

Hagin: You're just always sweeping pine needles [that] never end. It's like, if you think one Christmas tree in your living room is bad, having 200 is insane.

Ben-Achour: I was gonna ask if you ever worry about safety. I mean, because it's just you out here.

Hagin: I'm from New York, like, this is really not so bad. Obviously, yeah, stuff happens, and you have to use your best judgment about how to deal with it. But you know, there's a bunch of other Night Watch, and we all have a group thread. And if something's ever freaking me out, I just text the thread and be like, “Hey, what do I do in this situation?”

Ben-Achour: When do you sleep? And where do you sleep?

Hagin: So the company gets us an apartment. There's like eight of us there, so it's like four and four. There's a couple bedrooms, couple couches. It's comfortable, it's clean. I mean, as clean as it's gonna be living with, you know, four dudes.

Ben-Achour: In your other life, all the other months of the year, what do you do?

Hagin: I'm a line cook for the most part, though I've been trying to transition out of it. This seemed like a good way to do that. You know, work for a month straight doing something other than my normal job, get some money, and [it] gives me some time off to recalibrate and shift.

Ben-Achour: Can I ask how much one makes doing this?

Hagin: I'm making five grand for the season. Which is pretty good.

Ben-Achour: Now, will you go back to the line cook job after this?

Hagin: Hopefully not. I had initially quit so I could go to school to become an EMT, and that turned out to be a lot more difficult and a lot more expensive than I thought. Still working on that, but you know, I need to save money, need to get a lot of paperwork in order, and some time off is going to be helpful to do that.

Ben-Achour: You mentioned you kind of want to reset your life a little bit after this. What's your kind of gut feeling about how it's going to go this coming year?

Hagin: We'll see. I mean, I'm trying not to focus too much on the economic side of it, if I'm being honest. I just know that I wanted to make a change in my life. I had a moment a couple of restaurants ago. I walked through the dining room in the middle of a busy service and looked around at the clientele and just thought like, “What am I doing, serving expensive food to rich people right now?”

Ben-Achour: How is the restaurant business doing, from a line cook’s perspective? Like, was it hard to find new places when you left one?

Hagin: We definitely had a boom right after COVID. There were so few of us left with any real experience. Wages definitely took a pretty huge downturn after that. In 2021 and in 2022, we were getting paid really well, and now, not so much.

Ben-Achour: Back to Christmas trees: What is something that people might be surprised to learn about the business of selling Christmas trees in New York?

Hagin: I think people would be probably surprised by, you know, the camaraderie. It's just a really incredible group of hard-working people that just want to spread a little Christmas cheer.