Slithering surprise: Australian woman finds snake on her Christmas tree (highly venomous!)

Tiger snake found in a woman's Christmas tree in Australia. (Provided by Barry Goldsmith of Snake Catcher Victoria Australia.)

It probably wasn’t what she asked Santa for, but a woman in Australia got an early Christmas surprise in her tree this year.

According to professional snake catcher Barry Goldsmith, a woman in Melbourne found a tiger snake intertwined with the tinsel on her Christmas tree on Sunday morning.

“She’s didn’t panic, she just took a photo and sent it to the snake catcher, me, and 20 minutes later I had the little bugger in a bag,” Goldsmith wrote on Facebook with a photo of the holiday reptile.

I began to worry that there was nothing for him to eat all winter so I took a pick and chopped into our mostly frozen vegetable garden, exposing a couple of night crawlers about a foot below.

Mr. frog was glad to have a couple of bites over the next few weeks from the worms, kept in a plastic tub in the basement fridge.

The walkout basement windows faced south and some days, the frog would climb up the glass and sun himself in the Minnesota winter sun.

On one occasion, he passed a hard gray pellet onto the window sill, indicating he was in pretty good health.

He would occasionally venture away from the window and explore the pool table and wood stove but always returned to the window. He picked up a hair from the carpet one day and wife tried to remove it from his leg. He freaked and peed in the removal process but was unharmed by the ordeal.

The garden center said the tree we bought came from Upper Michigan. It's hard to believe the little critter survived the bundling and truck ride from the UP to south of Mpls.

We released him in late April when the threat of frost had passed.

I wrote a story for our local paper titled “The Frog Who Came For Christmas.”

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