I'm very happy to let my step-daughter (now 21) decorate for Christmas! She's been doing it for years now, and we've had some years when I sort of cringed (the year of all blue lights comes to mind), but she's having fun, it takes it off my list, and I never really got into it that much anyway!

I've always liked kid made decorations so much more than magazine perfect decorations. Your little line of pumpkins are great and the epic skeleton and alien battle is awesome! My family's tree at Christmas was always covered with all different sorts of ornaments, with the ornament clusters slowly expanding as my sisters and I grew. At Halloween my mom's house is covered with spiders and skeletons and webs. Last year my nephew came up with the idea to tie the lawn gnome to the giant spiders web!

I just want to say to you, Sarah, that you have GRAVELY disappointed me today.
If you think I come to Apartment Therapy every day looking for even the smallest amount of perspective and maturity, you are seriously mistaken. To click trustingly on my bookmark, only to be greeted with what looks like an intelligent, engaged mother's open-eyed re-evaluation of her own tastes and priorities, recognizing that homemaking is a collaborative pursuit at every level... well.
I'll be looking for my refund in the mail.
Good day to you, madam.
I SAID good day.

Plain pumpkins = Fall. With faces = Halloween. Turn them blank when the kids are in school. or 8 days before, have them all blank and turn to a face a day.

With parenthood you sacrifice going to non-G-rated movies, and a Pinterestable house. It's in the handbook, I checked.

Please, get a grip. After the age of maybe six Halloween is about CANDY, jeez...stupid decorations who cares...go to town mom w/e makes you happy. Gonna smash that thing at midnight anyway...hehe

Okay, jk, I realize not everyone had the ideal suburban childhood where they were allowed to be a hoodlum one night a year in fall but *sigh* -happy days.

Awww, you're a good Mom.

My nearly-five-year-old became obsessed with a 3-foot-tall plastic skeleton decoration he saw at a drug store. I tried, in vain, to get him to excited about making a skeleton decoration instead of buying this hideous piece of junk--I have no problem with displaying my child's art, but I never wanted to become one of "those people" who display store-bought decorations for every holiday and own things like wreath-hangers.
Eventually, though, we caved and got the skeleton--and it's a good thing we did, because we spent about 45 minutes with the skeleton laid out on the table, laptop open, looking at kids' anatomy websites and identifying the radius, the ulna, the sacrum, and so on. Sure, he would have gotten something else out of making a cardboard skeleton that was more in keeping with my DIY/handcrafted/art brut de l'enfant aesthetic, but we had a lot of fun with that creepy plastic $10 investment--and I guess I can just suck it up and pick up a wreath hanger so we can display it on the front door...

PS Besides, how many of us AT readers got our starts trying to decorate our homes for holidays?

I don't have kids yet, but could definitely see myself briefly struggling with the same dilemma. I don't blame or judge you. When decorating is your passion, and certainly when you have a certain look in mind, it is sometimes hard to step back to see things from a different perspective. Kudos to you for being open about it!

I bet you even get more positive comments on the jack-o-lantern faces and diorama than you would have from whatever you had planned :D

My mom is one that it must be her way. I hated every Christmas when it came to tree decorating. I was not allowed to help with the tree because I was told that I wouldn't make the tree look pretty. As a tiny child I was allowed to stick a few ornaments on the tree - in the back of the tree where no one would "have to see them". They were the ones that I had made in school or that had been given to me as a baby. My mother didn't want anyone to see them. When I was just in grade school my grandparents gave me their old little artificial tree. My mother gave me ornaments that she didn't want, because they were ugly, and the things that I had made/were given me and sent me down to the basement each year and made me decorate this tree. I was upset and embarrassed each year. I don't have kids but if I did my mothers idea that everything must be perfect would be to hard for me to break and I am not sure that I could let them help. I am really glad that I don't have kids to pass these horrible things down to.

My mum, from whom I and my sisters derived our love for decorating, would let us throw handfuls of tinsel (this being back in the 50s) on the tree. She tried gently to instruct us to put it on piece by single piece, but c'mon, really! After we went to bed, she would painstakingly remove the clumps and array the shiny tinsel strands one-by-one on each branch. It was absolutely fairy-tale like, and we thought we were decorating geniuses!

@Splitty -- wreath hangers work really well for HOME-MADE door decorations, too , you know! (I make handmade wreaths for every season -- not holidays, so much, as what might be in my garden at the time. Winter is a swag with pine branches, icicles, and goldfinches...)

However, not being a parent, I can obsess all I want to about perfecting my holiday decorations. When *I* was a kid, my Mother was in charge. For years in my teens she totally frustrated my decorating aspirations by putting up a Christmas tree with one string of white mini lights (everybody know you need 100 lights per foot height of the tree!!!) and precisely one dozen large red and gold metallic foil butterflies. Period. I can't express how boring we all found that, but to her, it was easy.

One of the reasons I chose to not be a parent was my unwillingness to be controlled by any children I could have. It was the right choice for me. (You may scorn that as "selfish" if you like, but there are lots of specific underlying reasons... ) Everyone should think about that kind of thing before just automatically thinking they have some kind of obligation to "get married and have kids." Know thyself!

So funny, this is what my daughter did to decorate her bathroom for Halloween!
http://www.jacolynmurphy.com/2012/10/pumpkin-mask.html

I have a 3 year old. He loves to help me decorate and I love seeing the choices he makes and figuring out a way to 'make it work' so that we're both happy with the result. I have his artwork framed and put up in various places around the apartment and he chose what pictures went on the walls in his bedroom. I generally do the 'bones' of holiday decorations (lights, wreaths, weeding out old items, etc) after he goes to bed, then he helps me fill in the details the next day.
He helps decorate the Christmas tree, putting up all the non-breakable ornaments after I string the lights. I do make some adjustments, since he can't really reach higher than about 3.5 feet up. He helps pick where the mini-trees and our reindeer statues should go, we make snowflakes together and tape them on the windows and on his door, Xmas cards get displayed somewhere kid-accessible so he can go through them whenever he'd like.
For Halloween, we taped plastic spiders all over the place and put up some plastic skulls and fake crows. He absolutely helped and came up with some creative places to hide spiders! His latest project is collecting leaves, we'll probably end up making a collage to hang somewhere for fall. I switch out pillow covers and throws throughout the year, most of which I made myself and he likes to help me choose fabric for my projects. The apartment does not look like preschool classroom by any means (most friends are amazed at how grownup it feels even with a 3yo around), but it is important to me that my child has a say in how his environment looks and feels.
Plus, it's a great opportunity for learning, we talk about colors, shapes, sizes, numbers, etc. And it's just plain fun to see what things he comes up with!

Wow. I like to think decorating is about making a home feel lived in, welcoming to friends and family alike. I cant imagine NOT incorporating the personal touches of my children when decorating for the holidays. I mean.. isn't that why we gather to celebrate holidays?? To spend time and engage in each other's idiosyncrasies? It shouldn't matter whether its putting up with Uncle Ed's drunk behavior at christmas, or your son's less than perfect pipecleaner skeletons at Holloween... A home feels best when others are comfortable in it, not when you're uptight because your design style is out of whack.

Have another eggnog and relax already.

Good for you, letting your child help decorate for Halloween. I think that kids should help decorate for the holidays. I have no qualms with that at all! More fun for everyone!

Wow. My family proudly let me hang up all of the ornaments I made in school. I doubt they still do that, but how does it make your child feel to say aww that's nice you made me something but I am going to hide it!
I even broke some of the glass ornaments! I hate those perfectly designed trees. They are hideous and impersonal.
Do you have family photos hanging in your house? Or do they clash with your design style?

My husband's family bought tree ornaments when they went on vacation, and my husband, in his childhood years, had the WORST sense of style or taste. Actually, this extended to most home decor things he was allowed to purchase with his own money. When we married, we "inherited" his ornament collection. Ohmygoodness. It's become a joke every year, now. Most of it does go on the back of the three. But if my son picks something out, now, it is going front and center!! It's a tree, for goodness' sake, not a statement on the homeowner's sense of worth.

I am going to pin the heck out of these photos! :) I might just take a leaf out of your kid's book and draw on my pumpkins too - much easier than carving. Also, that battle scene is totally epic and way cooler than anything I've seen Martha do. I have a friend whose father sets up his lovely Christmas village every year and then has his toy soldiers attack it on the day. I am glad some people don't grow up.

As my husband says, "It's not a Christmas tree unless it looks like it was dipped in batter and rolled in ornaments".

My 5 year old draws like a fanatic. Right now on our living room walls amidst the RIBBA framed gallery walls are taped with scotch tape, all of her individual drawings that she changes like an art gallery whenever she wants.

One day there will come a day where she won't want to put up the pictures or draw as much or won't live here and I won't get to see the new drawings all over the house. So I'm taking it while I can.

Perhaps I was just very lucky to have parents who had a more eclectic style and loads of patience, but decorating the tree during Christmas and decorating the house for various holidays was always a learning experience for me... taking into account the material of the decoration, color balance, spacing, the way light hits the surface (or not) and so on. My husband was banned from helping to decorate the tree because his mom didn't want it to be "ugly"... our trees were never ugly. They were warm, and eclectic, and not what you'd find in a department store, but honestly I think the right thing to do is get the children involved. You can still go back behind them and "fix" things, but I think those are the moments for at least a lot of us that starts introducing us to the whole world of interior design!

Wait, does this mean I have to let my husband help decorate too? ::shudder:: The man had geodes and cross-stitched Halloween ghosts up when we started dating... it was May.