Holiday decorating: what actually goes wrong

Holiday decorating produces a predictable spike in injuries every year, and the pattern is consistent enough to plan around. The Consumer Product Safety Commission put the season's emergency-room-treated decorating injuries at about 14,700, which averages roughly 240 a day through November and December.

What causes them

Falls dominate at 41 percent, well ahead of lacerations at 10 percent and back strains at 5 percent. Three of the deaths in that count involved falls from ladders. The implication is unglamorous: most decorating injuries are not about the decorations at all, they are about what people stand on to hang them.

• Set a ladder on level ground and have someone hold it, rather than reaching from the top step.
• Hang the high pieces before the room fills with boxes and cable.
• Keep lit candles away from anything that burns, and treat a live tree as something that needs watering daily rather than once.

Small parts and small children

A lot of decorative stock in any range comes in high counts of small pieces, and that is worth thinking about in a house with a toddler. CPSC's toy injury reporting recorded an estimated 154,700 children aged 12 or under treated in emergency rooms for toy-related injuries in 2023, with 10 deaths, and choking on small items was a recurring cause. Anything small enough to swallow belongs above reach, not on a lower branch.

When to put things up

Ordering ahead of the season is the practical move for bulk decorations, because the counts that cover a whole house are the first to go. Working backwards from the date the display goes up, and allowing time to check what survived storage from last year, avoids the two-day scramble that produces most of the ladder work.