Storing Christmas Decorations

Let’s talk about storing Christmas decorations. Probably 85% of you have already packed your decorations away but due to sickness and traveling I wasn’t able to finally take mine down until Friday. I thought I’d share with you how I store mine away for the next year. I store for easy retrieval. Nothing drives me more crazy than digging to the bottom of a stack of totes to find what I need.

I start by having clear labels on the totes. The label should include all the contents inside. Store like with like whenever possible. You can  store by room, by items, or by color. Storing by room doesn’t work for me because I like to move things around too much and I like to use different colors from year to year too, so storing by items work best for me.

Since we buy special ornaments for the kids every year they have a lot of random ones. I label large zip lock baggies with their name, to hold their ornaments.

To keep track of who’s ornaments are who’s, I write their name and date on the bottom or back of each one before I store it away.

Since I change my Christmas colors from year to year I have a lot of ornaments, especially round ball filler ornaments. Apparently I have a lot of red ones too. I store them in clear zip lock bags so I can quickly and easily see what I want.

I take extra care with my vintage ornaments. I store them wrapped in tissue paper and placed in plastic cups inside a small tote. The small vintage ornaments are packed away inside egg cartons and also placed in a small tote, then I place it in one of the larger totes.

I buy Christmas gift wrap at the after Christmas sales and that determines our Christmas colors for the next Christmas. Emilee helped me choose the gift wrap this year so here’s a sneak peek at our colors for next Christmas.

Then I go through our ornaments and pull out all the ones I will be using next Christmas, that’s easy to do since I already have all the ornaments and totes out. I store them in a box labeled “next year ornaments”. Next Christmas I don’t have to go through the totes and bags deciding what ornaments I’ll be using, since they’re already separated and bagged. All of this makes decorating for Christmas so much easier and less time consuming.

We recently moved and I don’t have a basement anymore which takes away a big chunk of storage space. The holiday totes are stored in an area of the garage and I store all the wreaths hanging from a wire shelf in another area of the garage. The shelf was already there and works perfectly to hang the wreaths from.

I have my storage totes separated by holiday. There are Christmas decorations in red and green totes. I also have totes for Thanksgiving, Halloweens, one labeled “pumpkins” since I use them for Thanksgiving and Halloween, Easter, Valentines, 4th of July, Winter, and Spring. When we moved I downsized my decorations quite a bit and got rid of things I hadn’t used for a couple years. Most of my holidays are 1-2 totes with the exception of Christmas.

I hoped this helped you with storing your Christmas decorations. Less than 11 months till we get them out again!