It's Christmas time in the desert, Chandler, Arizona.

The weather outside is frightful, I mean, by local standards.

The holidays are typically cooler than normal, you know, it's maybe 50 or 60 degrees.

You see people in winter jackets and toboggan hats and those kinds of things, but it's

more a mental thing that it is actual need for physical warmth.

So if you're dreaming of an Arizona white Christmas, I would keep dreaming.

Chandler, as far as I'm aware, has had snow three times in the last 100 years.

It's a very strange occurrence.

And if you are looking to say pull up to a Christmas tree farm and cut down your very

own towering Douglas fir, well, you can forget it.

You don't really find true Christmas trees like we think of them.

There are pine trees that grow in Arizona, but they don't do super well in the valley and

the Phoenix Valley where Chandler is located.

But that doesn't mean Chandler goes through the holidays without a Christmas tree.

Very far from it.

The necessity is the mother of all adventures, right?

I'm Dylan Thurace and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible

and wondrous places.

And today we are taking you to a city in Arizona where for 60 years, the locals have taken

a local weed, a nuisance and turned it into the centerpiece of their holiday celebrations.

A trip to the tumbleweed Christmas tree after this.

If you saw it at night time, all lit up, you wouldn't really think there was anything

...