The Nevada Highway Patrol has been putting up a DUI Tree or three years now. It all starts on Thanksgiving and goes until New Year’s.

At NHP Headquarters on Kietzke Lane, the DUI tree stands near the front door.

The paper ornaments are simple enough, but they carry with them a very serious message.

The dates on the ornaments are of DUI arrests made by NHP Troopers since Thanksgiving.

“It is becoming a tradition,” says Trooper Hannah DeGoey, with the Nevada Highway Patrol. “In the sense that is serves as a reminder to those drivers before they make a bad decision and get behind the wheel of a car,” she says.

Trooper DeGoey says this display in no way to celebrates arrests.

Rather it's a reminder of what crashes and fatals were prevented by taking a driver suspected of driving under the influences off the road

.

Most of these arrests so far have occurred during troopers' graveyard shifts.

Trooper DeGoey says they are trained to look for drivers who aren't maintaining their lane, traveling too close or breaking inappropriately.

That's when drivers will be pulled over.

“So initially, we are going to make contact with that driver in the driver's seat, and we are going to be smelling for odor. We are going to be looking at their pupils and we are going to ask where are you coming from, where are you heading to? And we want to see, are you impaired?” says Trooper DeGoey.

Sadly these won't be the last ornaments placed on the DUI Tree this holiday season.

Last year there were a total of 45 on the tree by New Year's Day.