It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

We have finally finished decorating the house. That is to say that Big D put lights outside, and I hung the stockings. We have a ton of decorations and ornaments, but I'm feeling a bit lazy this year, so we only got the tree, stockings, and tree skirt out of the attic. (Brief tangent - I totally prefer a real tree, but with four cats who all love to drink tree water and a toddler who would probably love to eat some fallen needles, we elected to purchase a fake tree last year. It's our own little contribution to mankind's carbon footprint.) While we have many beautiful and sentimental ornaments, they will not be making an appearance. That's because of The Monster. Next Christmas, I'd really like to dig through all of our boxes and separate the breakable/sentimental ornaments from the kid-friendly ones. Obviously we'll store the special ornaments until The Monster and any future tax deductions are older. It would be nice to have our other ornaments out, but the thought of the whole project exhausts me. So this year, to decorate, I made fancy bows for the tree.

I present Exhibit 1:

The tree does in fact have an ornament. Earlier this year, I bought a Starbucks coffee cup ornament on clearance in January. It has sat on my desk all year collecting dust and generally feeling neglected. To make up for being ignored for a year, it has a special place on our tree as the only ornament.

Exhibit 2:

Pumpkin managed the project from the loveseat:

Here are the (photoshopped) stockings that I finally hung up last night:

Yes, that is a stocking that says "Kitties."

And here is the final product. Understated, yet festive, no?