Growing up in Burney, Mike Vessels associated Christmas with snow and snowmen, but down in Chico there was a gap. It didn’t take he and wife Cory long to discover a substitute — painted tumbleweeds.

Holly Weiler didn’t recognize it as a Christmas tree at first. She’d been hiking the Trail 110 to Trail 140 loop on Mount Spokane for years now, but any image her tracks might be making was never a ...