BooMama is sponsoring a Christmas tour of homes so we can show each other around our places all decked out for the holidays. What a lovely idea! I’m looking forward to going visiting!

We have this friendly fellow right by out front steps.

This is on our front door.

These are on our side doors.

We don’t have much else in the way of outside decorations. I’d love to, but I can’t physically hang the lights, Jim hasn’t had time to, and the boys don’t really know how. A lot of homes around here have wreaths on all the front windows, and I have wanted to do that for some time, but usually right in the midst of the season there’s just no time, and afterward it is hard to find inexpensive wreaths. If I don’t get it done this year, maybe next year I will when the first Christmas things come out in the fall, before things get really busy with the holidays.

Welcome to the living room!

I’d like to tell you about a few special things in here. I showed some of our special tree ornaments in an earlier post, so we’ll go on to the decorations on the piano.

I usually have a few branches of greenery there, but just realized I hadn’t done that yet. I made the verse there for a calligraphy class years ago, but haven’t done much with calligraphy since, I’m afraid. I’d probably have to learn it all over again.

My mom gave me this several years ago. I has a button in the back that you can push to hear Christmas music and watch the lights flash. The boys have loved this.

This is something else my mom sent: a Nativity music figurine.

This is one of my most special treasures, also from my mom. I collect Boyd’s Bear figurines, and somewhere she found this Christmas tree with little miniature scenes all though it.

Here are a couple of close-ups:

On the other end table are these snowpeople.

I got the three snowboys because they reminded me of my three sons. 🙂 Then the boys got each of the bigger snowmen in a crane game. So we put them all together as our family representatives. 🙂 It just occurred to me that I should get a little feminine hat for one of the bigger ones to represent me. 🙂

I think Jesse bought these for me one year:

So that little area looks like this:

As you can tell, I have pastel colors and a lot of pink in my home. That’s a bit of a dilemma at Christmas with all the reds: some of my ornaments and things that were given to me have red in them. In recent years I’ve leaned toward the maroonish bluer reds and dark pinks that would go better with the rest of the decor. But, as I said in the earlier posts about ornaments, I want this all to be family-friendly more than “designer” decorating, so for the most part I just don’t worry about it. However, I was delighted to find this little snowman in my living room colors:

Here are the last couple of things in the living room:

This is something else my mom sent when the boys were little. They don’t do much with it now, but they used to love moving the little mouse from pocket to pocket through December.

I was excited to find this “Noel” sign in pinks and blues, and it works well at the window over the kitchen sink:

One of my favorite decorations is this little mouse. If you light the candle in the back it looks like a fire in the fireplace.

Here is the fireplace in the family room with the stockings. I made the plaid ones after we were first married and a dear friend knit the others for each of the boys as a baby gift after they were born. The rest of this room is in blue, tan, and off-white, so the red doesn’t clash with pinks in here. 🙂

I made these ages ago and they are getting worn and falling apart a little, but the boys love these.

Lastly is this little guy in a corner of the family room by the door:

Thanks so much for stopping by! Come visit any time. 🙂 I’m looking forward to visiting the rest of the homes linked to BooMama’s Christmas tour, but it may take me a while to get around.