Live Christmas Tree Care: Protecting Your Joyous Investment

If you’re a fan of real Christmas trees, you can probably remember at least one year when you had to carefully extract a dry, prickly beast from your living room, leaving more needles on the floor than it had on it’s branches in the first place. If you’ve been down that road before, you know live Christmas tree care is actually important business at this time of year.

Improperly cared-for trees can result in sad, messy Christmas seasons, not to mention very serious fires. A dry, dead Christmas tree is a fire hazard like no other. The National Fire Protection Association says dry Christmas trees are much more likely to catch fire, and although Christmas tree fires are not as common as you might think, when they go up, they can be among the most dangerous types of home fires.

About 1-in-18 Christmas tree fires result in death compared to about 1-in-141 home fires.

Avoiding a tinder-dry Christmas tree takes more than proper watering. It takes proper selection and good precautions against fire as well. Let’s start from the beginning:

How to Select a Good Live Christmas Tree

Part of doing what it takes to have a healthy, safe, good-looking tree on Christmas morning has to do with picking out a really fresh one at the beginning of the Christmas season. Here are a few tips for picking out a fresh live Christmas tree.

Ask for a freshly cut tree, and if you can, verify that it wasn’t cut long ago.
Beware of dry needles, brittle branches and a dry, musty smell. These are bad signs.
Make sure it hasn’t been trimmed too much and isn’t too beaten up for aesthetic reasons.
Don’t pick out a tree that’s been lying in the warm sun for a prolonged period of time. This can make a tree dry out really quickly.
Ask the seller to trim a half-inch to an inch off the trunk right before you take it home. This will help it absorb water once you have it in the stand.
Make sure there’s a long enough trunk on it that you won’t have to clip a full whirl of branches off to place it fully in your stand. This will make it look wimpy and un-full when you’re all done. Look for at least 5 or 6 inches of trunk on your tree unless it’s taller than 6 or 7 feet.
Ask the seller to shake the tree with a mechanical shaker, or simply drop it onto its trunk a few times. This reduces the number of dead needles caught in the tree. These are normal, but can contribute to mess and increase fire risk slightly.

Live Christmas Tree Care

Once you have a good Christmas tree picked out, proper live Christmas tree care will ensure it lasts, reducing the risk of fire and the likelihood that it will look good, smell great and be easy to remove at the end of the season. Here are some tips for keeping your tree alive at least until Santa has a chance to put the presents under it.

The biggest key to live Christmas tree care is to water your tree daily if you have to in order to make sure the end of the trunk is always fully submerged in water.
Don’t cut the trunk of your tree at an angle, nor into a V-shape or a point. You want the bottom to be flat so the tree is less likely to fall over.
Pay extra attention to your tree if it doesn’t seem to be absorbing water. A live tree can easily “drink” a few cups of water each day — and as much as a gallon immediately after it’s cut. If only a little water seems to be leaving your stand, your tree may have died and no longer be absorbing water. It will dry out quickly if this occurs.
If your tree begins to dry out rapidly, or if it’s been left out of water for 12 to 24 hours and will no longer absorb water, try trimming another few inches off the bottom of the trunk and put it back in its stand.
If it becomes completely dry and brittle, get rid of it. Dry trees pose a much greater fire hazard than properly watered, live ones.

Avoiding Christmas Tree Fires

If your tree is properly watered, it should be fairly fire resistent. Some tests have shown that properly cared for trees can actually be more fire resistant than fire-retardant artificial trees, because they contain so much water. However, there are a few things you can do to take extra precautions when it comes to avoiding Christmas tree fires.

Avoid those old, big Christmas bulbs, which can get really hot, as well as those that bubble or intentionally create a lot of heat. I know they’re fun and so are those ornaments that spin or move as a result of hot air caused by them, but they’re unsafe.
Keep your tree away from heat sources, which will definitely dry it out and can cause fires. Over the last few years, one in every five Christmas tree fires was caused by a heat source.
Use only UL-approved Christmas tree lights and cords to light your tree. Avoid frayed, severed or otherwise worn out cords no matter what.
Keep ornaments out of reach of small children so they aren’t inclined to pull on the tree. Tipping it onto themselves could be just as dangerous. If you can, anchor the top of the tree into the ceiling with a large eyelet or a hook and a few loops of sturdy fishing line.
Keep pets out of the room where your Christmas tree lives. They can quickly tip the tree or chew wires when you aren’t looking. Again, you can mitigate this risk by anchoring your tree to the ceiling.
Turn off tree lights when you go to bed.

Live Christmas tree care doesn’t have to mean being a total Scrooge, but not taking proper care of your live tree can result in serious risk. Take a few steps to protect your joyous investment this year and teach your kids that part of the tradition as well. If you do it right, live Christmas tree care will mean a fragrant, beautiful tree all season long.