Oooops. My bad. Here it is the 10th day of Xmas already and unless you are one of those cheap bastards who wait for Christmas Eve to put your tree up ‘cuz the lots are all selling them at half off, then you’ve already been enjoying a week or two of one of the holiday’s most popular traditions: filling your home with toxic molds.

If you are like many people, you’ve probably come down with a bad cold mid-December of Christmases past and assumed it was one of the joys of winter that you just have to deal with, undoubtedly brought on by all those snot-nosed walking plague-ridden children at the mall. That’s what you get for not doing your holiday shopping on-line. But even those of us who click on Amazon.com to do our holiday shopping may still come down with a nasty bug. It turns out there is a good reason we don’t drag dying trees into our homes the other 11 months of the year. That’s because they are giant allergen-producing potential killers. No wonder the Germans like to claim they are the ones who came up with the idea of the Christmas tree.

Since lice and other creepy crawlers were just part of life back in the day, bringing a once but no longer living tree into your home for the holidays didn’t have much of an impact on your family’s health. But pine trees are covered in mold. And thanks to the warmth of modern-day housing and central heat, those mold spores multiply more than six fold before you even get your tree decorated. Thanks to your holiday spirit, there’s a fungus among us, and your Christmas tree could give you the gift of a hospital visit. ‘Cuz while you’re decorating your tree, your tree is decorating your home with thousands of tiny, fuzzy bits of mold, bacteria, and bugs.

One study tested various kinds of pine trees and found 53 different types of mold, 70 percent of which could lead to respiratory problems, up to and including bronchitis and pneumonia. And if you think you’re going to outsmart Death by setting up a fake tree, those plastic abominations are covered in a year’s worth of dust, all of which gets dispersed in the room when you set it up. So don’t be surprised if you give your friends and family an asthma attack for Christmas.

But wait! There’s more! Traditionalists enjoy nothing more than cutting up their tree and burning it in the fireplace after the holidays. Generally, fire is a good method for destroying molds and bacteria. Heating up those growing in and on your tree, not so much. Along with that warming cackle and pop your tree makes as it’s burning to death – and do I have to bring up the Germans again? – your tree gets the last laugh. As the wood warms it releases even more bacteria into the air. And into your home. Just in case the first wave of bacterial invaders didn’t get you.

So happy holidays! Merry Christmas! And enjoy your Christmas tree. But you just might want to wear a haz-mat suit in your home during the holidays. That might not be gay apparel, but it will keep you alive.