Christmas Is Over,

and soon the last of the trees will come down and be put into storage, or disposed of,

it takes Diana some time decorating ours, and putting it back in boxes ready for next Christmas, but the time it takes her is nothing compared to the effort that Harold Lloyd takes to decorate his tree, he is one of Hollywood’s legendary stars of early 1900s silent comedy, and as the owner of a year-long Christmas tree adorned with over 5,000 colorful decorations, the Hollywood legend, who starred in such films as Safety Last! (1923) and High and Dizzy (1920), is said to have had a collection of over 8,000 decorations collected from all over the world. But what he is most famous for is using most of these eye-catching baubles to decorate an impressive Christmas tree that is now regarded by many as the most adorned Christmas tree that ever was,

all photographs from Vintage Evereyday, according to Lloyd’s granddaughter, the comedy actor loved decorating the Christmas tree so much that he started working on it before Thanksgiving and barely finished in time for Christmas,

“It started sometime around Thanksgiving. My grandparents would take me downtown to the train yards where the annual shipment of trees would arrive for the holiday season,” Suzanne Lloyd recalled. “We would pick out three large Douglas firs and they would be wired together to make one enormous, fantastic Christmas tree. It sat at one end of the garden room rising 20 feet in the air. It was 9 feet wide and almost 30 feet around. Imagine the amount of presents that can fit under a tree that is 30 feet around!”

but unfortunately there was a downside, the weight of thousands of baubles, some adorned with heavy precious stones or made from thick glass, meant that Lloyd would have to improve on Mother Nature’s work with drills and wires, a number of trees, cut off their branches and then drill holes into the trunk of the strongest tree and insert those branches, securing them with bamboo poles and metal wire,

“One year we counted over 5,000 ornaments hanging from the tree and we still had enough left over to decorate 3 more trees just as big!” Lloyd’s granddaughter once said. “Every year the tree grew larger to hold more ornaments; then one year it became a permanent fixture in our home. It was simply too large, too decorated, and too engineered to disassemble. So we had it fireproofed and celebrated Christmas every day of the year!”

Harold Lloyd’s Christmas tree became a permanent fixture in his Greenacres home and became the highlight of the tour, when the place became a museum, after the actor’s death, in 1971. However, it didn’t last long, as debts and complaints from neighbors forced Lloyd’s foundation to sell Greenacres at auction, the developer who bought the property leveled the gardens, sold the house, and subdivided the land, and with that the end of the most decorated tree that there ever was, another couple of days on the twelfth day of Christmas, ours will be going upstairs to hibernate until later this year!