Tell Homebase how you decorate your Christmas tree for a chance to win a £300 voucher!NOW CLOSED

[RebeccaEMumsnet]

It’s officially December, which means that most can’t deny that it’s time to start thinking about putting up your Christmas decorations!
To celebrate their Christmas range, Homebase want to know how you decorate your Christmas tree.

So, do you have a family ritual for decorating the tree? Do you put on some festive music and get all the DC to help, or are you quite particular about what goes where? Does each year mean a new theme for your decorations, or do you like to mix old and new? Do you love homemade decorations, or do you prefer a more polished look? And finally, the ultimate question, is it a star or an angel on top?

However you decorate your tree, post a comment below to be entered into a prize draw where one Mumsnetter will win a £300 Homebase voucher.

Thanks and good luck,

MNHQ

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Ours is a complete mixture of ornaments, but all of them have memories. The only scheme is that the precious ones go at the top so the cats can steal the unbreakable ornaments

Every time I go away in Winter, which is a couple of times a year, I bring back a special bauble, often related to the place, e.g. An aboriginal design from Australia, an Eiffel Tower from Paris. I think we have a really lovely collection now. Add to it lots of lights and tinsel and bingo. Got the biggest tree we could fit in this year. Barely room for us!

We have coloured lights this year and some red and gold baubles and then we have some special baubles too that people have given as gifts over the years.

Yes the family ritual is that we put it up on the first Sunday of Advent (so 27th November this year). We put on a Christmas Carols CD and spend about two hours decorating the tree.

Our decorations are all on a blue and gold theme, collected over the course of the past 20 years or so. Each and every one tells a story. Since having the children I always buy two of each design so that at some future point they can divide the Christmas decorations 'spoils' equally.

It would be fabulous to change the colour scheme but it's very expensive to do so in one go. I reckon our decorations must be worth well over£400!!

We buy a real tree in the first half of Dec, put on carols and get busy. The DC always helped in the past but have lost some of that enthusiasm as they have reached their teens. We still have the same old decorations, added to as the years go by, and everyone has their favorites. Mine are the things the children made. On top we have an angel, though it has been a star in the past; the angel sits better on the whole.

we tend to put ours up on the first sunday of advent and sing Christmas songs while we do it. We have quite a few musical toys (singing Santa/snowman/dog etc) so as they have batteries put in, we end up singing along with them!
We have 2 trees; 1 which the kids decorate (fibre optic so no lights needed) any way they want, the other is mine - it's a pop-up tree with everything already attached so looks perfect every year!

A friend told me I have POPD, aka perfect ornament placement disorder! I let my 4 year old do the tree then he goes to bed and I make sure all the orientation are perfectly positioned!

We buy a tree from our local tree farm on the first of Dec and then on the 2nd we decorate it together as a family while listening to Christmas music and drinking hot chocolate. Our home and tree are all decorated in traditional scandi style as we love the rich warm colours. All of the ornaments on the tree are ones we have collected over the years and every year we add a new one.

Forgot to add, we have a gold star on the top that I inherited from my gran.

I put the tree up.. Kids decorate it. I rearrange when they're in bed. I also remove some of the yards of tinsel job done.

The tree is usually bought on the 8th (today ! ) and put up the following weekend. We have a beautiful capiz angel for the top, a light gets stuck up her skirt and glows through beautifully. I have 2 decorations sets, one very tasteful, the other a very random collection of homemade and heirloom and acquired ornaments. It depends on my mood on the day which I choose.

my DC are 2 and newborn so our traditions are only just starting.
however, tree decorating day starts with a trip to pick a tree decoration each. then home to an early dinner and bath, into Jim jams with Christmas music on. at some point oh would have assembled the tree and got the lights on ready so me and DD put all the decorations on. 90% are toddler height! we normally have to remove the cat from the tree several times during the process and any angel or star on top instantly becomes his target practice!

When I was little we had a turquoise tinsel tree. We loved it at the time

We now have a real tree, 10 ft at least as we have a vaulted ceiling.

There is a mixture of expensive porcelain decorations, and all the kids home made efforts for the past 10 years.

I buy everyone a new decoration each year with the intent of making it more poncetastic, and getting rid of a few of the hideous creations, but never seem to have the heart to do it.

The kids decorate the lower branches, and I put the expensive fragile items way up high.

There is usually a fight or two, either between me and DH, or amongst the kids. It is never quite like in the adverts, but we all love it - the twinkling lights, the smell, the memories...

As the DC get older, they have taken over the whole thing, and I let them get on with it as I de-tangle the lights. :) They love choosing where to put the decorations, and putting the star on top. We keep all their homemade baubles and add to the collection year after year. It is a wonderful reminder of times past and links us together with the tradition. It makes all of us happy.

Kids don't want to help any more
I do it with a glass of wine and it's filled with all the decs that the kids have made, photo baubles of them and random buys. No fancy matching decorations here!

I love decorating the tree, with Christmas carols in the background - usually the Annie Lennox Christmas CD. Or sometimes, if I'm not well enough to stand up to decorate, I'll sit at the piano and play carols on that instead.

I have lots of decorations from when I was a kid. Really nice ones like a carousel horse. They are one of the few positive things I have from an otherwise rubbish childhood. I always decorated the tree by myself - my parents would never bother otherwise - and I feel so attached to the decorations.

Christmas is much better now I have my own kids, and we nicked the idea from MN of buying the kids a decoration each Christmas. However that has evolved into getting decorations as a family throughout the year instead. I look in the gift shops of places we visit during the year (lots more now as the DCs are home educated) - so we've ended up with an elephant from the Indian fabric exhibition at v&a etc. These decorations mean a lot more to us as they remind us of all the fun places we've been to. :)

Decorating the tree is a family event. This year my daughter wants to do everything except the tinsel - we'll see how long that plan lasts! It's the first time she's remembered about some of the ornaments before we've got to opening the box.

We have a whole mishmash of decorations which gets added to each year. There's no theme, no colour scheme, but lots of joy and memories.

We get a new decoration from my dm every year, and we get her one back, so they are very varied with no scheme. This year was the first year I said no tinsel to dh but compromised on around the stand. Always a real tree, selecting it is a real family event

We mostly use old decorations, which we have built up over the years. DH and I have similar taste and are quite particular about which ones we buy, we love hand crafted ones, especially Scandi style. We both loathe tinsel!

We usually decorate the tree on our own without the kids, as it would look a mess if they did it!

We have two trees. I decorate one with the delicate ornaments I've collected over the years, all very nicely coordinated and with subtle warm white lights. The other one is decorated by the children with a big bag of multicolored plastic baubles, tinsel and coloured lights they chose themselves years ago. Theirs looks like an exploded tin of Quality Street, and is always prettier than mine

We decorate our tree on the first Saturday in December. We have Elf the movie playing in the background and wear Christmassy jumpers and tshirts.
Its lovely getting out the older decorations that have special meaning and chatting about when we bought them and where from. We always have one or two new decorations to add each year too.
Some of the decorations were made by our son which have very special meaning for us and make us smile, especially as he's 19 now .
We love that our decorations co- ordinate rather well in golds, oranges, browns, creams and greens with a slight woodland theme. There are two huge strings of warm white lights that fill the tree too.
We absolutely love Christmas and decorate the outside of our house with lights and lanterns filled with lights too.

With a 4 and 6 year old I don't get to decorate my tree anymore. I long for a beautiful tree like in posh magazines, instead I have one with things in the wrong places and I'm itching to rearrange things!!!!! But my eldest has an incredible memory and his brother is almost as bad so if I move anything it will be detected so for a quiet life I am having to sit on my hands. One day I would love to go and buy a new set of decorations...

The children do it and it looks rubbish so I sneak in when they're in bed and tweak it.

The children decorate the tree with decorations they have made themselves and a pile of decorations which have been handed down from grandparents. It might not look perfect but it is perfect to them.

Since the kids have come along, we put our tree up on the 1st December, we get the Christmas songs on, we put on our Santa hats and dance about while we decorate the tree. Our decorations are a mix of mine and my husbands childhood decorations and decorations we've bought for and with the kids. Nothing matches, the colours a wild, we love it! We have an angel and a star because we like them both! Me and my oldest now make new decorations out of fimo and hang them on the tree too, a tradition I intend to keep going with my twins when they're old enough :)