Trees and Halloween

With Halloween just around the corner, the smell of witch craft and wizardry, as well as copious amounts of chocolate, sweets and face paint are once again among us.

October sees the beginning of the cold, long and dark winter months here in the UK. The trees in your garden and neighbourhood start to fall and you see the Evergreen trees in their full glory. Unfortunately, this means that most of your trees will be bare soon, perfect for giving your neighbourhood that Halloween feel though!

How should you go about decorating these trees to give it a more spooky touch? Don’t fear we have lots of ideas.

• You could hang items from the tree branches such as lanterns and bat shaped items.
• You could hang ghosts made from squares of white material from the branches.
• You could place pumpkins around the base of the tree (of course be careful with candles*).
• You could wrap lights around the tree trunk or branches to highlight the spooky effects.
• You could have items popping out from behind the tree trunk if you know that the tree trunk will only be seen from a certain direction. I.e. a vampire, zombie or even a scarecrow.
• You could drape those fake cobwebs you can get around the tree branches.

*If you don’t want to use candles in your pumpkins to light them up then you could place some of your led candle effect lights in the pumpkin. You could even paint a circle on the face of your pumpkin with some of that chalk board paint and then draw on them.

Here at CareFell we want to make sure that however you dress your tree up for the Halloween season that you bear in mind the following things….

• Don’t wrap a new or fragile tree in lights or decorative items as it may not be able to cope with the additional weight. Use an established tree.
• Remember that if you are wrapping lights around it that you are going to need more lights than expected. The string of lights will need to be wrapped around the circumference of a tree which quickly will eat up lengths and lengths of lights. A tree that only has lights on a quarter of its trunk or branches is not going to look very pretty or spooky.
• Take off the decorations and ornaments once the Halloween period is over, leaving them on there will mean that the tree grows around the item. You don’t want lights permanent fused to the branches do you?
• Take care with higher branches; ensure that you have the necessary ladders and support.
• Avoid using tools such as nails to attach your decorations to the tree, simply wrap the items around the tree trunk or use items such as string.
• If you see any branches or elements of the tree that are unstable then do not put weight on them. You should then have this tree checked out by a qualified tree surgeon such as ourselves. The tree itself could be damaged by the weather, by age or by a number of other factors including a fungus.

Most importantly, we hope you have a spooky Halloween.