Christmas Decor

Time, once again, to put away the Christmas decorations. My house always looks so sad and lonely after all the Christmas decor has been put away. On the other hand, it's much easier to keep things clean when you're not constantly cleaning tree/ garland/ centerpiece needles!

Here are some of our decorations from this year:

I let the kids help with decorating/ putting on even the breakable ornaments this year. The lack of 'spacing' the ornaments about drove me nuts, but I managed to hold myself back from re hanging the ornaments. Ha!

Our family room tree was HUGE this year! Like, takes up 1/4 of our family room big. Once Big Daddy started cutting it down we realized it was either 2 trees that grew into one or one tree that split at the bottom. We loved it though!

This was probably my favorite mantle yet. Although next year I would like to add something behind the wreath.

I loved this grouping on the left side of the mantle (just the silver stuff, not the birthday Elf of course. :-)

I loved having a dining room table to display our nativity. Not sure if I'll do it exactly like this next year, but this was nice for this year.

This was ML's first year to have her own tree. She chose pink. Of course.

I made her pink and white tree skirt and let her decorate her own tree. Which led to some unusual groupings of ornaments.

Like this. (I spy with my little eye, a certain photographer reflected in a silver ball or two. Hello there blog readers!)

Even pink ornaments:

This was probably the third year for JR to have his own tree. Unfortunately, I didn't get around to making his tree skirt this year. The one he always used before was used on the new playroom tree (see below.)

This was JR's new ornament, and it was hysterical!

More:

Oh, the groupings! How you bother my OCD. LOL. I do love that JR puts these ornaments on his tree though. This toy soldier was one of the ornaments my parents made when they first got married and didn't have any money to buy ornaments for their fist Christmas tree together.

This was my first year to use mesh. I really liked how it turned out on the breakfast room chandelier.

And finally, this was our playroom tree. We love Disney. We love Disneyworld. And we have acquired just a *few* plush animals from our trips. This year I came across another Disney lover who talked about her 'plush tree' and even though I knew it would be 'only playroom' worthy, I had to give it a try.

I must say I loved it. It was perfect for the playroom. The kids could take the 'ornaments' on and off to their hearts content. They could rearrange whenever they wanted and I could have cared less. Perfect!

It also went really well with Big Daddy's Pooh tree skirt from his childhood (previously used under JR's room tree.) AND with the Pooh animatronic my grandparents gave to me YEARS ago, that had never before seen the light of day.

Now I'm off to pack up all of this stuff. Wish me luck!