From the outside, Thomas Jeromin’s house, in Rinteln, Germany, doesn’t look at all out of the ordinary, but as they say, ‘it’s what’s inside that matters’, and in this case the inside is nothing short of spectacular – a forest of artificial Christmas trees, 110 to be exact, decorated with a whopping 16,000 baubles.

Up until five years ago, Thomas Jeromin decorated a single Christmas tree for his house, just like the rest of the world. However in 2012, he decided to get more of them just to spread the Christmas spirit throughout his home. The idea turned out so well that the next year he upped the number of Christmas trees to 20, then 45, 80 and finally this year he got his epic collection to a whopping 110 trees. They are literally everywhere, from the living room and halls to the kitchen and even the bathroom. The only no-tree zone of the house is the master bedroom, at his wife Susanne’s request.

As you can imagine, installing and decorated over 100 Christmas trees takes a while, and Jeromin confirms that this year he has needed eight weeks to get his house ready for the winter holidays. He began in October, and spent a whole week just bringing the artificial trees down from the attic. It then took him another seven weeks working from morning until evening decorating them with over 16,000 Christmas baubles, hundreds of LED light installations, garlands and wreaths. It was all worth it, though.

Photo: video caption

Thomas is a local celebrity in Rinteln, and his house has become a sort of holiday attraction, with neighbors stopping by to see what it looks like filled with even more Christmas trees than the year before. This year, Jeromin and his uniquely decorated home made national news, and people actually started sending him more Christmas trees. He had 110 when news crews visited, but in a subsequent interview, he claimed that he had added four more to his collection already.

Christmas decorations are not the most expensive things in the world – although they can be – the costs add up when your’re talking hundreds, even thousands of them. Jeromin says that the expenses on his passion are manageable, mostly thanks to the fact that he buys them at huge discounts. He claims that the best time to buy Christmas decorations is two or three weeks after Christmas, when shops sell them at a fraction of their original cost, just to be rid of them. Also, the electricity for the six-week period that the trees are up in his house adds up to about 100 euros, which he thinks is reasonable.

When it’s time to take down the trees until next Christmas, Jeromin is busy for another two weeks. He puts the trees back in the attic, and packs all the decorations neatly in their boxes, for which he has special storage rooms set up.

Thomas says that most of the people who visit his house call him crazy, but he likes nothing more than to have Christmas trees everywhere. He admits that artificial ones are not as good as real fir trees, but having to buy over 100 of them every year would simply be to expensive.

And to think that I though spending a month decorating a house for Christmas was extreme. Thomas Jeromin is just on a whole other level, though.

Sources: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Express