Have You Seen Any Strange Hitchikers On Your Christmas Tree?

As a lifelong real Christmas tree lover, this story gave me the creepy crawlies. Over the years we've had a few hitchhikers, like the occasional spider, ant, or Box Elder bug, but nothing as weird as one family in Ohio.

This incident occurred in 2018 but the "victim", (as it were) just posted the story to Tik Tok recently.

The woman's family had purchased a real Christmas tree and found that it came with thousands of Praying Mantis bugs. They saw a nest in the tree when they bought it, cut off the branch, and put it outside. The nest proceeded to hatch the freaky-looking Praying Mantis babies.

But they missed another nest in their tree and it later hatched, as the tree owners desperately tried to vacuum the bugs out of the tree!

Apparently, Praying Mantis do build nests in Christmas trees. But your odds of getting one filled with their nests are pretty remote. One source (Snopes) indicated that approximately 1 in 100,000 Christmas trees might have them.

The nests are kind of hard to see because they look like little pine cones themselves. So you could easily mistake them for something else.

My family has had live Christmas trees almost every year and thankfully dodged the Praying Mantis plague. But I do have a hilarious story about my younger sister being bitten by one once. At least it was hilarious for me!

So if some of your ornaments start crawling, you might know why!

Sources: Taste of Food and Snopes