Christmas came early for one family in Australia — thanks to a special furry ornament found in their tree: a live koala.

The McCormick family found the creature tangled in lights and plastic branches on Wednesday evening.

“Well that’s something you don’t see every day,” wrote Amanda McCormick in a Facebook post. “We just came home to a real life koala up our Xmas tree in our lounge room!”

McCormick told the Guardian that the festive animal “must have crawled in when the doors were open. It would have been in our house for at least three hours.” She added that they had seen koalas on their trees before, but never inside.

The family called the local Adelaide and Hills Koala Rescue. At first, the hotline operator thought it was a prank call.

“But no, a koala desperate to get in the Christmas spirit had wandered into Amanda McCormick’s house and decided it wanted to be the fairy on the Christmas tree,” Adelaide and Hills Koala Rescue wrote on Instagram. 

“Tis the season to be jolly… Koalalalala Lalalala.”

McCormick’s daughter, Taylah, shared a video of the koala on TikTok. As of Friday, the post had over 300,000 likes, with comments including “best decoration ever” and “this is the most Australian thing I’ve seen.”

According to the Australian Koala Foundation, it’s likely that there’s less than 80,000 koalas remaining in Australia today, possibly as few as 43,000. If the population continues to decline, the animal is at risk for extinction.

Because much of their habitat has already been lost, AKF provides Australian families guidance on how to make their properties more koala-friendly.

“Due to habitat destruction and the incursion of developments into existing Koala habitat, many Koalas are now forced to live in the same places as humans,” writes AKF.

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