You’re in the living room decorating the Christmas tree…
When you notice something odd.
It looks like a small pinecone on one of the branches.
But when you try to remove it…
It doesn’t budge.
You shrug it off.
After all, it’s just a bit of natural decor.
Right?
Weeks later you walk into your living room to a scene straight out of a horror film.
The room is crawling with small creatures.
On the tree…
The furniture…
The walls and windows…
They’re everywhere.
And they’re fast.
If you’ve ever bought a Christmas tree directly from a farm, you may have noticed
them putting the trees into strange machines before handing them off to you.
The machines shake off any dead needles that would otherwise end up
littering the floors of your home, but also get rid of any creatures that
may be hiding amidst the branches.
But then this raises a few questions.
Is the shaking process fool proof?
If not, what uninvited guests could be hitching a ride to
your holiday festivities?
And, what can we do to keep them out of our living rooms?
Well, we’ve looked into it and found multiple cases of Christmas trees
acting as Trojan horses for pests that range from disgusting… to deadly.
And just in case you were thinking of avoiding any home invasive species
this holiday season by getting an artificial tree instead… think again.
Real trees aren’t the only ones coming with gifts absent from any wishlist.
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January 2019.
Molly Kreuze was excited to leave the Christmas tree up after the holidays.
But the cozy ambience of her home was ruined when the living room suddenly
became invaded— hundreds of bugs emerged out of nowhere and started
climbing on the Christmas tree, making their way up the walls and windows,
and even hanging from the ceiling.
Upon closer inspection, Molly found out that these were baby praying mantises.
The tiny bugs had just hatched, and were quickly spreading
all over her living room.
But Molly wasn’t the only one with the unexpected Christmas gift.
November 2018 — Andrea Coward went to a tree farm with her family to cut
down their own tree for the holidays.
Two weeks after they put the Christmas tree up, they suddenly started to
find praying mantis babies everywhere.
“They were on the tree branches, and then they just started running
down the tree, across the floor, they were just scattering all over”
She reposted photos of the praying mantis babies in November 2023 captioning it
“Beware of the real trees”, to warn people early in the holiday season.
with other users commenting about issues with unexpected stowaways that ruined their holidays:
“One year we set up our tree and put lights on it and such, and the lights defrosted the MF HORNETS and they were big mad”.
“Mine was filled with Brown recluse spiders with a bunch of babies. My whole house was covered and my puppy was bitten on his nose and died within 2 hrs”
Another video posted on TikTok shows baby mantises dancing on an ornament!
So, how do these critters find their way on Christmas trees
unnoticed in the first place?
Mantis egg clutches are walnut sized, and look a lot like un underdeveloped
pinecone, so they’re often overlooked.
Females lay these egg clutches in branches during the autumn, which will
stay in a stasis during the winter months before hatching in the spring.
However, when you bring them into the warm air of a cozy home, the hatching
process is accelerated, and the bugs will act as if they have already wintered,
and in a few weeks, the egg sac will burst into a horde of hatchlings right
in the middle of your living room.
Like any sane person, Molly wanted the little green invaders out of her
house, but being a veterinarian by trade, she didn’t want to harm them.
So she grabbed a shoebox and set to work sweeping them up into it with an envelope.
As you can imagine, this was no easy task— since unlike many other
day-old newborns, the mantis children were fast and skilled jumpers.
But Molly was determined to save them all because she knew
someone would take the whole lot.
You might ask, who on earth would actually want that?
Turns out, mantises are very helpful to have around since they eat harmful
pests, and some people are willing to pay money to have them in their gardens.
One man’s pest, another man’s pest control.
Now, while a living room full of mantis babies may be annoying and even
nauseating to think about, these tiny creatures aren’t exactly dangerous.
But unfortunately, the things hiding in your Christmas tree can get a
lot scarier and a whole lot harrier.
December 2020.
An Australian man’s Christmas cheer was disrupted when, instead of tinsel, he
found a web strung on his Christmas tree complete with an intruder— a giant spider!
The arachnid was covered in fur, and, upon closer inspection,
curled up and very much dead.
However, the webs surrounding it were crawling with itsy bitsy baby spiders.
The man was seized by panic.
Though the spiders were small—for now—he was uncertain of their species,
and was worried that they might spread around in his home and be harmful to
his young kids, so he posted on a local community Facebook page asking what
they might be, getting responses like “that house belongs to the spider now”.
And people are right to be concerned, it’s no secret that
many Australian spiders are deadly.
Funnel-web spiders, which look a lot like the one in the photo, have a bite
that can kill within a matter of minutes— their venom containing Robustoxin, which
wreaks havoc on the nervous system.
Thankfully a commenter that was in pest control came to the rescue, saying “They
look scary and venomous, but not deadly”, so the family wasn’t in immediate danger.
However not everyone’s spider encounter spins a similar tale.
November 2017.
Paul Stephen was outside the local grocery store in San Antonio, Texas,
about to get some shopping done.
Passing by the Christmas tree section outside, he thought it
might be a good idea to choose one of the small firs to bring home.
Picking up one of the trees, he came eye to eye with a spider with
a red marking, hanging on one of the tree’s branches— a black widow!
Black widows are notoriously venomous and could suddenly turn your holly jolly
Christmas to a creepy crawly horror story.
And while their bite isn’t very painful, like a tiny pinprick to most, the toxin
they excrete, called alpha-latrotoxin, quickly incapacitates nerve cells, leading
to intense pain in the muscles, including the diaphragm, causing breathing issues
and in some extreme cases result in death.
Definitely not a guest you’d want to invite into your home for the holidays.
The grocery store later explained that the trees were delivered within 48 hours
of being chopped down, taking all types of tiny hitchhikers along for the ride.
So, what did Paul do when he found the black widow?
He nonchalantly snapped a photo for his Instagram and moved on to the next tree.
“Black widows aren’t that uncommon, so it didn’t occur to me to freak out”.
So now that we know what we could be inviting into our homes by getting a
real Christmas tree, the easy solution is to just get a fake tree, right?
Wrong.
2019.
Amy Lenihan, a mother in Kentucky, started to find dead spiders in
and around the house, and found them to look a little peculiar.
They were different from the other house spiders that they would normally
find, with a weird violin-shaped spot.
After a couple of weeks, and picking up more than 25 dead spiders in the
basement where they had a playroom, she became increasingly worried about
her 2,5 year old son Eli playing there, since she found some among the toys.
Unable to figure out where the spiders were getting in from, and overwhelmed
because she was expecting another baby, Amy called a local pest control company.
The exterminator, David Ohnefloss got to the bottom of the issue.
He immediately had bad news: the dead spiders were brown recluses.
One of the most venomous spiders, bites from the brown recluse can cause
necrosis and can even lead to death, and the risk is higher for young children.
And when David investigated the basement, he found more of the spiders, alive.
"I happened to pop that box open and voila.
There they were.
I found two live ones in there.
When I picked the box up to move it, I found one underneath."
Said box was an artificial Christmas tree that the family had bought online, but
since it wasn’t Christmas season, they had just popped the box into storage without
opening it, right next to Eli’s playroom.
Amy was horrified.
“He was playing right next to them alive.”
So, how did the spiders end up in the Christmas tree’s box?
Brown recluse spiders aren’t native to the area, so David had a theory: “Packages
will sit in warehouses for long periods of time and that's all it takes is for them
to get in there, duck into a box and just wait to be transferred somewhere else.”
And while the source was found, not all of the spiders were caught.
David found spiders in the master bedroom and the attached bathroom, and
suspected they had moved throughout the house through the HVAC system.
All he could do was to lay down some traps in order to catch spiders on the move.
Amy would have to live with the spiders for a while.
She said she would probably be paranoid for at least another year
about the spiders, but was still thankful: “We were extremely lucky
that we did not find out the hard way and then didn't know what it was.”
After David posted the story on Facebook, it went viral and people
started to wonder if they had the risk of finding brown recluse spiders
hidden in their delivery boxes.
However, David said it was a very slim chance, and it was the
only time in 30 years that he’d seen a brown recluse infestation
caused by hitch-hiking arachnids.
Rick Vetter, an entomology associate and expert in brown recluse spiders
agreed, explaining that the lighting and busy schedule of a warehouse would
likely keep spiders away, and that you’d be more likely to encounter a
brown recluse in an attic or garage.
So now that we know what could be hiding in a real or fake Christmas
tree, how can you safely bring a tree into your home without getting
featured in a YouTube video?
While spider webs are allegedly the reason why we decorate our trees with
shiny tinsel on Christmas, according to European folklore, what are some
trusted ways to keep our trees pest free?
If you insist on an evergreen tree, sprinkling some Diatomaceous
earth would get rid of spiders without harming the tree itself.
But the easiest method to get rid of critters is to shake the tree out
before you bring it into your home.
If you get your fresh Christmas tree from a dedicated seller, like a tree
lot or a farm, they might even have a device that will shake any dirt,
snow, and uninvited guests loose.
However shaking won’t get rid of mantis egg clutches!
To ensure your tree is mantis-free, check for pine cone-shaped egg
clutches on the branches, paying extra attention underneath.
If you find any, there’s no need for immediate panic— cut the branch
piece with the cluster on it from your tree and place it on a shrub
outside to hatch in the spring.
You can also follow what some TikTok users have done, and pop the
clutch in a closed container in the fridge and wait for them to hatch.
Being able to observe baby mantises isn’t a chance that you’ll get any day and
they really are fascinating creatures.
And if you have a synthetic tree, using plastic containers might be
the best option for storage, as it is harder for pests to get into.
Also make sure you dispose of any decor made from edible items,
like popcorn garlands, cookie ornaments, and gingerbread houses.
Should these methods fail, you might feel like all hope is sucked out of you.
But according to experts, the best means of removal inside the home is…a vacuum.
So that your holiday cheer isn't overshadowed by a critter fear.