You can’t swing an Elf on the Shelf around Maryland’s state capital this time of year without hitting a Christmas tree.

One out at Annapolis Town Center, a mix of apartments and condos stacked atop stores, started glowing last weekend.

Twenty-four more glitter in the State House lobby every year, set up by the Maryland Federation of Garden Clubs to symbolize all the counties and Baltimore.

Gov. Wes Moore’s staff decorates one upstairs in the grand reception room and, across the street at the mansion, first lady Dawn Moore oversees another.

More trees are on West Street and Maryland Avenue. The Naval Academy has one in Nimitz Hall, where midshipmen gather gifts for children who won’t get one without their help.

Lighted trees float along Spa Creek, blinking like crazed channel markers, during the Eastport Parade of Lights.

Over in D.C., Joe and Jill Biden will light their final national tree as president and first lady, a tradition for the White House occupant since 1923.

But in Maryland, Gov. Wes Moore can’t do the same. None of these trees — nor a single fir, cedar or pine anywhere in Maryland — is the official state Christmas tree.

We simply don’t have one. Do we need one?

“That’s a great question. You know what, well, let’s see,” said Jamie Costello, a retired television journalist who’s officiated at public tree ceremonies for 20 years.

“They light the monument in Baltimore. They light the White Marsh tree. They have one in Fells Point. Yeah, there should be,” he said. “But where do you put it?”

Maybe the most important Christmas tree in Annapolis is the one that lights up Sunday at City Dock. Costello will be there for the Grand Illumination, and lots of others will, too.

If you want to look for the Maryland tree, it’s a good place to start.

It’s not as if the state lacks tree traditions.

Catholics, Anglicans, Presbyterians and Quakers colonized Maryland but ignored Christmas greenery because of its alleged pagan roots.

Both the Paca House and Gardens and the Hammond Harwood House, mansions built in Revolutionary days, are decked out for the holidays with ropes of greenery, wreaths and holly. It’s more about modern ideas than history.

“Early on, decorations were prohibited,” said Lucinda Dukes Edinberg, curator of Hammond Harwood. “Even the Colonial Williamsburg admits its decorations aren’t historically accurate.”

By the 1820s, notes on celebrations and concerts started slipping into newspapers in Annapolis and Baltimore, even if the mansion-dwelling swells didn’t join in.

Two years after Charles Dickens published “A Christmas Carol” in 1843, a printer in Philadelphia released a collection of poems and stories for children called “Kriss Kringle’s Christmas,” complete with a lithograph of a wobbly Kringle putting gifts on what appears to be a fig tree.

German immigrants soon harrumphed that this commercialization of presents at Christmas was a corruption of their gifts for pious children centered on decorated trees, Christkindl, but the ideas of the modern holiday were off and running.

Christmas candles — a terrifying idea — were on sale in Baltimore by 1865.

In Annapolis, Mrs. F. Ruther’s candy store advertised Christmas tree decorations along with chocolates by 1884, and by 1913 the city decided it needed a public tree — complete with the new electric lights.

“If you want the city to have a Christmas tree, if you want to engender the spirit of Peace on Earth: Goodwill to men, meet the mayor at half past 8 o’clock in the Council Chamber,” the local newspaper thundered on its front page. “Let a large number of people turn out.”

Not a religious symbol really, more of a community centerpiece. It became a tradition in Annapolis, celebrating the tree at City Dock on the Sunday after Thanksgiving.

Like any holiday tradition, disagreement breaks out over change. Sometimes new ideas don’t work.

The company that decorated the tree in the late 1990s swapped out shiny red globes for things like hay rakes and crab traps one year — an homage to farm and Chesapeake Bay connections. There were suggestions about early composting.

Sometimes they do.

Loni Moyer, owner of Garden Girls Landscaping, has been decorating the tree for the past five years. When the Naval Academy Alumni Association sponsored the tree, it provided decorations made from selected covers of its magazine, “Shipmate.”

“I have to say that that was probably the tree where folks had the most emotional connection,” Moyer said. “Folks would walk by and they would see an image of someone they knew. ... So I learned there that it isn’t always about the sparkle.”

Personal connections to the Annapolis tree at City Dock, even though it’s funded by the Downtown Annapolis Partnership and the city as good for business, make it more than just seasonal decoration.

“I am pretty sure that if I looked hard enough, I could find an image of me with my dad down there when he was mayor,” said Moyer, whose father and mother both officiated at the illumination.

As a candidate for official state tree, the Annapolis giant has a lot going for it. Carols begin under the 25-foot tall Fraser fir at 3 p.m. Sunday. Youth ballet and adult chorus performances follow.

Santa, played by Costello for the last few years, arrives by boat or fire truck with Mrs. Claus and Elfie, really just volunteers Nancy Almgren and Judy Buddensick in red and green.

Flipping the switch at 5:15 p.m. involves the mayor, even if there is no actual switch — just an extension cord someone plugs into an outlet on cue.

“The children are just fantastic,” Costello said.

It might not be possible to have a state Christmas tree.

When I pitched the idea to Costello, he had the right reaction. Given the personal nature of the evergreen symbol, traditions linking generations together through a big tree decorated in the public square, how could one tree stand for all of us?

But if Maryland had an official tree — if only in our imagination — Annapolis is the place to light it up.

“We are the capital city, and I think there is an expectation of celebration and beauty and excellence,” Moyer said “Folks come to Annapolis in general, whether specifically for the tree and the ceremony or the winter ambiance, lights and the decorations.

“It raises one’s spirit in the otherwise doldrums of winter.”