As the holidays come to an end, we begin our least favourite part of the season: putting away all of our decorations.
I don’t know about you, but when I first moved out of my parent’s home and it was my turn to put away my own Christmas decorations, it was a disaster. The next year I didn’t know where anything was, had shattered ornaments, broken lights, and beads tangled on everything you could imagine.
That year I decided to sit down and do some research on the best practices to avoid buying new decorations every year.
Many of the solutions I found required purchasing organizers from Amazon and while that may be practical, it would have ended up costing me hundreds of dollars with all the decorations that I have. As a student on a budget, that wasn’t an option for me.
Over the years, I’ve managed to find some environmentally-friendly storage solutions for Christmas decorations using everyday household items and I’ve compiled them all into this one blog. These methods have all been tested and have worked for me so I’m sure they will protect your decorations too!
Get some disposable cardboard from opened gifts and wrap your lights around them before placing them into boxes, it’s that easy! The great thing about this method is that you can also label each piece of cardboard so you know where your different strands of light belong next year when you unpack.
Ornaments can have a lot of sentimental value and if you store your ornaments by just throwing them into a box they’re likely to get smashed and crushed by the weight of everything else on top of them.
An easy way to avoid this is by storing your ornaments in empty egg cartons! They can be reused every year and are a great way to protect your ornaments for practically free.
Have large ornaments that won’t fit in egg cartons?
You can either use apple cartons or the next time you go out for coffee stock up on a few cup-holders and place your larger ornaments in those! Just like the egg cartons they can be reused each year and provide great protection.
Over time, all batteries slowly discharge on their own.
If you're planning on storing your electric decorations for a long period of time you should always remove the batteries as this will reduce the risk of corrosion and slow down their discharge rate.
After every holiday I always remove the batteries and then tape them right onto the package! That way they’re organized and easy to find for the next holiday season.
Wreaths are prone to losing their shape and color if stored in a box. To keep them looking as fresh as possible the best way to store them is by putting them on hangers wrapped in a plastic bag. Then they can easily be hung in the closet wherever you have space!
This is the best thing to do if you want to make your life easier in the future.
Label everything before putting it into storage so that you don’t have to spend hours of your time running around the house trying to figure out what goes where.
When it comes to storage for Christmas decorations you should always leave your things in a cool and dry environment.
Doing otherwise might cause some decorations to lose their color or stop functioning.
If you don’t have any suitable storage space at home I recommend using Fellow. Fellow is an on-demand storage service and this is where I personally keep all my decorations.
The best part is they pick my stuff up and take pictures of it so I have a record of which box my items are in! This makes it super easy to recall my items from storage as I can always get back exactly what I want when I want it.
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