Having a Christmas tree starting a house fire during the Christmas season is bad enough, but in the off-season seems even worse. According to NFPA¹, the National Fire Protection Association (US), 1 out of 4 house fires started by Christmas trees happened between February and November. How can this be?

This time of the year

The report published by NFPA¹ summarizes data relating to fires involving Christmas trees from 1980 until 2020. First, the good news: Injuries caused by these fires haven seen a drastic decline and have been in the single digits since 2018.

Moving on to the more surprising part of the report, house fires based on months between 2016 and 2020. On average, 160 accidents happened per year. As one might suspect the majority of the fires started during December (41%) and January (33%). However, this still leaves 26% unaccounted for. The rest is pretty evenly spread amongst the other months. This implies that about 11 house fires due to Christmas trees occurred during summer every year.

Where did I leave my tree again?

Not only the time of year for the fires seems kind of odd, the location of the trees are also interesting, to say the least. Common and living rooms have been the most popular places to light the tree. But they only make up for roughly 85%, including general spaces and outside. One could expect, the remaining 15% could be storage rooms and garages, a place to keep the tree during off-season. However, these places only make up 5%. About the same number of trees started to burn in bedrooms and another 5% in the kitchen. It seems less surprising that a tree starts to catch fire in a kitchen than people having their Christmas tree in the kitchen.

We didn’t start the fire

Trees rarely start burning by themself. In the majority of cases, the cause is either a malfunction of an electrical device, a heat source that is too close or reckless behaviour, like not paying attention or literally playing with fire.

This should be a reminder for everybody to take care when celebrating Christmas. It is supposed to be a time of peace and coming together, but accidents can happen at any time, especially when we are not paying attention.

Sources

1. Christmas tree fires report | NFPA. (z.d.). https://www.nfpa.org/education...