Our house was made to be decorated for Christmas.
It's lovely through the rest of the year (we think) but at Christmas it really comes into it's own. We have lots of wooden beams and natural wood doors, lots of lovely old brickwork, a big fireplace, and it really looks beautiful against the traditional Christmas colours we use to decorate with.
I love decorating the house, and we have spent years collecting really personal Christmas decorations, either carefully chosen and bought, inherited from much loved relatives, or homemade by me and DS.
Everything we put up to decorate has a special meaning to us, a special memory, so it feels really personal and unique.
But there's be no point in decorating it if we didn't then enjoy it, so we like to spend time together at home, cooking special food, playing games, making craft things and more decorations, and we always invite friends and family and neighbours around to celebrate.
We have a blackboard wall in the kitchen and people write Christmas and New Year wishes on it throughout the holiday. Even Father Christmas writes a message when he calls on Christmas Eve. And at the end of the holidays I always take a photograph before we have to wipe it all away. It's a lovely memory of the season.
We've had a few worrying moments with some of the more expensive or irreplaceable inherited ornaments, because our dog likes to sleep under the Christmas tree, and has knocked it over more than once. In the end, DH put a nail in the wall and we tied the tree to it with tinsel to keep it upright. 
And then there was the year we spent Christmas day cooking dinner while simultaneously dismantling the kitchen, because DH managed to drop a bottle down the back of a big cupboard, and smashed it, leaving wine leaking out from underneath and the only way we could get to it to clean it up was to take the cupboards apart.
It's not a proper family Christmas without something going wrong though. I mean, part of the fun of Christmas dinner is someone saying "hey, remember last year when this happened" and we all get to laugh about it.
It's just the place we can all gather and enjoy being together, remembering lost loved ones, looking forward to the future, making new memories and laughing about old ones.
My favourite Christmas memory in this house is of DS, aged two but almost three, coming downstairs the morning after we decorated the tree. He was in bed asleep when we decorated it, so he had no idea until he reached the living room door. He just said "Wow!" and sat down in the doorway. It took him ages to inch forward on his bottom, saying "wow...wow" until he was brave enough to sneak up to the tree and touch it. And then he said "Can we keep it?"
I think that's the first Christmas he remembers, the first one where he knew what was happening, and it was magical that year doing all the things you do with kids, walking around our neighbourhood looking at other people's lights, visiting Father Christmas, making decorations, putting out a mince pie and a carrot, hanging up stockings.
And that's what makes our house a home at Christmas, just that wonderful, magical feeling, and all the memories and hopes it brings with it.