BUY RAT TRAPS WITH YOUR TREE. The Christmas tree we bought last year may have infested our house with RATS! Our problems started shortly after buying the tree, and lasted for about a month, with little bite marks in our bananas (which I thought was our toddler biting through the skin) and feces all over the floor ( which I thought was droppings from the tree, because we had never had a real tree before and didn't realize that little black droppings don't come from trees). Once we figured it out we exterminated all of them with shovels, traps, and poison (making for an exciting holiday season while we had guests). I believe my child even got ill (possibly a mild Huntavirus infection) from the amount of feces that was in our kitchen. The exterminators put traps around our house and neighborhood and did not find any other rats in our neighborhood over a period of a couple months, none of our neighbors had problems, no port of entry around our house was found, and the exterminator concluded that they could have come from the tree, where a couple of them were still nesting in the tree skirt. Marry Christmas