Rockford and the kids spent a lot of the weekend getting the house ready for the holidays, and as a result it’s begun to look a lot like Christmas at our house.

There’s a little telephone shelf on our living room wall from way back when people actually had home phones. Poppy took charge of decorating it this year. I love that she gave the Griswolds’ car a place of honor.

Instead of driving out to the Christmas tree farm this year, we decided to get our tree from the grocery store. It’s a good-looking tree, and it cost half as much. We may be grocery-tree people now. We also have small, tabletop trees in each kid’s bedroom. Pete’s is a white tree, and he uses most of Rockford’s “Star Wars” ornaments to decorate it. Poppy’s is a sparkly pink Barbie tree that’s pre-decorated.

Here are a few of our favorite ornaments. Rockford’s grandmother gave me a couple of White House ornaments over the years, and I love them. I’m hoping to get the 2015 one for Christmas this year (a hint I’ve already strongly dropped to Rockford). I’m not sure how long Rockford’s had his Hoosiers champion ornament, but it’s one of his favorites. And of course there’s Space Ghost. Christmas just wouldn’t be Christmas without the good cheer that Space Ghost brings to the tree.

Rockford and Pete decorated the mantle this year. They took a more minimalist approach than I usually do. They did a great job.

The ornament display trees on the mantle are new to this year’s holiday decorating. I give Poppy and Pete an ornament every year so they’ll have a nice collection of them when they move out and have their own places and their own trees. This is the first year we’ve put any of them out. Poppy chose to display her first ornament, which I bought at Bluestem in Columbia MO in 2005, and her two cat ornaments. I bought the Marsha T. Cat portrait in 2011, and my friend Melissa made the felt portrait of JJ T. Cat for me in 2013. Pete’s picks were his first ornament, the personalized block I commissioned from Robin Plemmons in 2010 and the Flapjack’s Pancake Cabin ornament I gave him last year.

Rockford has been slowly amassing a collection of outdoor lights over the years, and his decorating out there has expanded from the bushes in front of the house to the flower-bed-island-thing in the middle of the yard. I’m thinking of making some of the giant ornament balls we saw in my brother’s neighborhood at Thanksgiving to hang in one of the trees out front. I also saw a how-to for some ginormous light balls that stay on the ground when I was searching for the ones for the trees. There may be some DIY in our future.