Christmas is less than a week away. I like to think there’s no wrong way to decorate a Christmas tree. We’ve tried to keep a consistent color theme in years past. This year, we rummaged through the storage boxes from our recent move and found all our decorations dating back 20 years…so we decided to slap them all together into one big hodgepodge of memories.
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I see your dog is doing poses. Ours was about a foot to the left…just enough to cut-off part of the the tree if I tried to put her in 
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And a very cute dog!
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I used to have several trees, but since I’ve downsized I limit it to two. One is coordinated and the other is a family/memory tree.
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Definitely hodge podge here! My Christmas trees I call my “Memory Trees.” I’m an ornament whore. They are full(!) of Christmas ornaments - a diary of our lives. We’ve even got some from when H & I were little. We have photo ornaments of the kids every single year. We have them from everywhere we’ve been. We have homemade ones. We have some needlepoint ones that H’s grandma made. We have one my mom crocheted. I have easily over 1000 ornaments between the two trees. This year, at started counting them on our big tree downstairs - just from one little viewpoint, one slice of the cone - I stopped at 170.
The big deal in our town is colored vs white lights. Many people here say colored lights are tacky. Or they did 30 years ago. I liked colored. They’re more fun. Once the kids were born, we switched to colored. Once we moved to our current home 17 years ago, I started putting up 2 trees. The big one in the foyer that everyone sees from the street is white. Then we have our old one in our bedroom with the colored.
However, this year I stopped the upstairs tree. Nobody is home to see it and it’s too much work. I left bad for the cats who all LOVE to attack and tear apart the tree skirt. So, I got that out and it sits in our room. And yes, they still attack it sans tree.
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We go both ways—LEDs that fade from color to white. The tree is a memory palace of our 47 years together, starting with a few of the ornaments I crocheted for our first bare tree.
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We used to have multiple trees in our former home, now we’re down to one tree. For a few years, we’ll keep all of the breakable ornaments packed away. We already gave our kids their special ornaments.
Our preschool age GD loves to help decorate, so she takes off and puts on the ornaments on the lower branches several times a week. When the one year old is here, we keep a baby corral around the tree even though H has it tied to the molding.
We now have felt, knit, wood, wax and plastic ornaments. Even some of those have suffered a little from exuberant play, but so far super glue has mended all of the damage.
We’ve always used colored lights, both on the tree and outside. I don’t care if some think they’re tacky. We also have some inflatable decorations for the yard, both for Halloween and Christmas. They stay on 24/7 during the holidays because I don’t like seeing “dead” inflatables on the grass. Our GDs and neighborhood kids love the Disney holiday inflatables and some come to take photos with them.
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Inflatables are so fun when you have littles in the family. 
We don’t have them at our house anymore but we do at the family lake house so the elementary aged kiddos can enjoy. We put them up as a family at Thanksgiving and take down after New Years.
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Snoopy and Olaf are my favorites, but I can see that the huge snow people would be a big hit with the kids.
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Snoopy is a sentimental one since my now college kiddo chose it. Olaf and Rudolf are recent additions by the young kiddos. The huge snowman family are favorites of everyone. We may have to find a replacement when it goes. 
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I have seen ads for a child’s Christmas tree- basically made of green felt with “ornaments” that can be put on, moved around, etc. Thinking about getting one for GD next year when she is 2 1/2.
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One of the hodgepodge ornaments I found was a buried Christmas bulb from 2011. That’s our college-bound daughter’s handprint when she was in Kindergarten. Am I that old? 
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Ours has always been a hodgepodge.
I just told my husband the other day that next year I think we need to switch to white lights, which means colored lights will be the “thing.”
Here’s the bottom of our tree
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This year, the tree is my memory tree. It has ornaments given to me by parents, students and colleagues from my workplaces since 1973. Each one is dated and marked with the person who gave it to me. We alternate this ornament box with the collection of things DH and I have collected including things we had before we married.
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We have several slim trees tucked into corners of the dining room, sunroom and office. They are dressed in simple color coordinated balls with white lights. Our main tree is a memory tree. To solve the color/white light debate, I mix them. The tree is 11 ft. and all white was a lot of white. First I put colored lights deep in by the trunk. Next are 2 small strands of white twinkle lights, semi deep. Then the bulk of the lights are white. The mix gives it just a little extra interest. It’s hard to really tell in the photo.
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Hodgepodge. Every year I’ve gotten the girls an ornament for something they liked that year and most are still here. When those leave I have a box of vintage Disney ones I can supplement with.
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I like the inflatables when they are inflated, but around here they spend most of the day looking dead.
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Our tree is definitely hodgepodge. I’ve got ornaments the kids made, ornaments I grew up with, ornaments from Japan and Germany, snowflakes my sister-in-law crocheted, ornaments from an AOL ornament exchange, ornaments artists friends of mine have made etc. I try to pick up one new one a year. The tree is a little smaller than usual and only half the ornaments are up. Usually I have a Christmas village under the tree, but no one is coming home this year, so I’m not bothering. (We did have a crowd for Thanksgiving.) The big question in our family regarding lights was the big old fashioned ones vs the small ones. I like the small ones best.
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Nothing sadder than dead inflatables! Lol
We put them on timers 10a-midnight. So there is some “downtime” but not all day.
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