"Beware of the Real Trees" — Woman's Christmas Tree Is Infested With Praying Mantises

The Nightmare Before Christmas isn’t just the title of a famous Tim Burton movie. It's also what I would label this woman's horrifying holiday surprise. A few years ago, there was a major problem with her real Christmas tree that turned her home from merry and bright to scary and full of fright. Now, she's speaking out about what happened in order to help prevent this from happening to others.

From the fresh crisp, piney aroma to the mental health benefits, there are so many pros to getting a live Christmas tree versus an artificial one. However, there are also some cons. An Ohio woman named Andrea shared one potential con that I'm sure none of us could even fathom.

“That time our tree hatched a million friends. Only a fake tree from now on," she wrote in the copy of her now-viral TikTok video. In the nine-second clip, Andrea gives users an up-close look at her tree's branches which are swarming with praying mantises.

In the caption, she writes, "Beware of the real trees" and includes some hashtags such as #prayingmantisoftiktok and #christmastreefail.

Users had all kinds of thoughts in the comment section.

Some cracked jokes. "12 drummers drumming, 11 pipers piping, 1,133 prayers praying," read one comment.

"You could just let them hold ornaments," wrote one another.

Meanwhile, other users seemed to think that a tribe of praying mantises was actually kind of cool. One user wrote: "Ummmm that's actually so cool I'd prefer praying mantises over spiders any day."

A second said: "Am I the only one who would love this? I’d be letting my kids clip on food for them like an ornament."

Unfortunately, there were also some folks who had similar mishaps with their Christmas tree, and not everyone had a happy ending. "I had a bat in mine one year. That was fun lol," revealed one user.

Another user said their tree was saturated with baby spiders. "Cat knocked the tree over and 400 trillion baby spiders went in 900 different directions. I almost burnt the house down," wrote another.

A third revealed they also had spiders in their tree, and it resulted in the death of their pet. "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 two hours," read their comment.

Another user even said they once discovered hornets hidden in their Christmas tree.

Andrea shared more details about her praying mantis-laden pine in another TikTok video.

"If you’re going to get a real tree, just thoroughly inspect it," she advised, revealing that this had actually happened during the holiday season five years ago. And up until that year, Andrea had always gotten a live tree without any problems.

"We did cut our own tree. They did shake it," she recalled but clearly, that wasn't enough.

“While I know a lot of people said “oh I would love it if this happened," Andrea continued, "you really don’t want hundreds of them racing through your house and scattering everywhere."

I couldn't agree more! Hopefully, we can all learn from Andrea's video. If you're going to get a real tree, you should really go over it with a fine tooth comb figuratively and literally because sometimes the bugs be bugging.