Grand California Fire

[Prudence]

I kid you not. It appears in some International Building Code. It was big news here last year because WA was going to adopt the IBC and people were quite annoyed with the Christmas tree and BBQ prohibitions. They ended up not adopting those provisions.

Apparently in less forested portions of the country, cut trees dry out and ignite. (This is particularly true if your wacky German friends and relations insist on putting LIT CANDLES on their trees. But that's another story.) Hence the ban in multifamily dwellings, where one person's flaming Christmas torch can displace multiple familes.

Here, the argument in favor of cut trees was that we grow our trees in state so they're "less dead" than in other states where trees are shipped in.

Regardless, I have a faux tree because one of my cats has a personal mission to destroy all plants and I got tired of coming home and finding the tree had been knocked over. Again. She leaves the faux tree alone.