Portal Christmas Tree

Ryan Kelly's 'Portal' Christmas Tree

A Reddit user named Ryan Kelly and his co-workers put together one of the geekiest Christmas trees ever: the Portal Tree! Their clever creation appears to be heading straight through a portal, frozen in time at mid-fall.

After seeing Kelly’s Reddit post about his Portal Christmas Tree, io9 reached out to Kelly to find out how he did it. And lest you fear a real tree was split to accommodate their idea: it’s an artificial that came in three parts. Kelly and friends put the bottom two parts on the floor with the top part dangling from the ceiling.

He added rope lights around on the floor and ceiling, filled in some blank spots near the top with a garland, and used black poster board to give the holes the proper look. The only tricky part came with the upside-down tree branches, which were made to be held outstretched by gravity. Kelly and his friends had to use fishing line to hold the branches up.

In my mind, this begs the question: why didn’t they just install it right-side-up? Just flip the entire setup so that the tree appears to be falling through a hole in the floor — the top of the tree would be right-side-up on the floor, with the larger bottom part hanging from the ceiling. I suppose the bottom section would have been too heavy to hang safely from the ceiling. But it would have solved that pesky branch/fishing line issue.

Regardless, the Portal Christmas Tree is an ingenious bit of holiday engineering. ForeverGeek tips its hat to such dedicated geekhood. Well played!

Head over to io9 to see more photos.