When you bring home a Christmas tree from a Christmas tree farm, there’s a slim chance that there might be an animal hiding inside. One family found an owl hiding in their Christmas tree. The Rockefeller Center Christmas tree also had a small owl hiding inside its branches. In both of these cases, the owl was fine.

If you have an artificial Christmas tree, you’d probably think that there wouldn’t be any chance that an animal would be able to get inside the tree. If you have a doggie door, that may not be the case.

Aubrey Iacobelli had a rough start to her morning on December 10, 2020. Around 4am, she realized there was an animal hiding in her Christmas tree. She decided to start recording.

Iacobelli stood in her living room in Tallahassee, Florida, and explained, “There’s a cat inside my Christmas tree.” She assumed the cat got inside through the doggie door. Her dog was in the living room staring at the tree and the animal inside while Iacobelli tried multiple ways to get the cat out of the tree.

First, Iacobelli used a frying pan to try to encourage the cat to leave the tree. Then, she got a bottle of vinegar to spray at the cat. Next, the grabbed a Christmas figurine off her mantel and tried to poke the cat with it to get it to move.

It’s at this point in the video that Iacobelli realizes there is not a cat inside her Christmas tree. She wasn’t sure what kind of animal it was. She thought maybe a squirrel.

As she tries to zoom in through the branches to see the animal better, we also see that this is not a real tree but an artificial tree. Originally, we thought perhaps the animal was inside the tree when she brought it home from a Christmas tree farm. No. Not possible. It must have come in through the doggie door like Iacobelli originally thought.

Iacobelli decides to bring her dog back into the room and take him off his leash in hopes that he will be able to scare the animal out of the tree. At this point, Iacobelli has a good view of the animal, which is climbing higher up the tree. It is very clearly a raccoon.

Watch the video below to see how the raccoon gets out of the tree and what room it goes to next.

Iacobelli started filming around 4am, and it was around 5am that she stopped filming. The whole ordeal must have been a very stressful hour, but it seems that she is already starting to see the humor in it. We’re definitely glad neither animal got hurt.

Have you ever found an animal hiding in your Christmas tree? How would you react if you found a raccoon, squirrel, owl or cat in your Christmas tree? As Iacobelli mentions at the end of the video, the best idea is to call animal control.