This is a time of year when families gather from across the country.

But with that also comes a heightened risk of fires inside the home.

There are more home fires in December than any other month.

The vast majority of those blazes, though, can be prevented with some simple steps,

like the kind you learn from firefighter and paramedic Jason Patton of Riviera Beach Fire Rescue in Florida.

He runs the wildly popular and irreverent YouTube channel Fire Department Chronicles.

Making sure that your family knows what to do in the case of any emergency, but especially a house fire,

is just as important as anything else that we can talk about.

And by the way, you actually have to practice it.

R. William Brigham recently spoke with Patton to get some fire safety tips.

Jason, such a great pleasure to have you on the news hour.

Help me understand this. Why is December such a big month for fires? I mean, is it because we're dragging dry, flammable trees into our houses and putting them next to our fireplaces?

That definitely doesn't help. But it's mainly because you're having more people together or more cooking, but also during the winter months, it is getting colder.

So more people are turning on their heaters or they're bringing space heaters into the house.

And sometimes we don't create the best practices when it comes to those space heaters.

So increased cold months on top of sometimes overloading the extension cords that we're using.

All of those things can contribute to

increase fires. So what are some best practices? Like if you're going into someone's typical

Christmas overcrowded bunch of relatives squawking at each other, when you're looking around the

rooms and thinking about that, what are best practices? Anytime you're going to have space

eaters in the home, you want to make sure that

there's nothing next to it.

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