Storing Christmas Decorations

Since Epiphany is tomorrow (the 12th day of Christmas) and my city’s tree-cycling program ends this weekend, it’s time to de-decorate. Honestly, it’s fine: as much as I love Christmas, I recognize that its ability to thrill me every year stems in part from the fact that it’s a limited engagement. Also, while I never deprive myself in the holiday treat department, at some point I shift from craving great-great-grandma’s brown sugar cookies to craving vegetables, soups, and tonics—and that seems like a good, natural pivot point into a new year.

Because I’m so pro-Christmas, and I’ve moved a lot, and I like efficiency, I’ve come up with a few good systems for storing Christmas decorations, and I thought it was a good time to share them:

• Ornaments: anything with feathers or wool goes into my cedar chest so the moths don’t get it. The rest gets tessellated into a plastic storage bin in the garage. But I was getting increasingly unhappy with the fluff and mess of newspaper-wrapping ornaments. So, this year I took all the extra Christmas fabric left from my advent calendar project plus some leftover yarn and made little drawstring bags in various sizes for padding the ornaments and keeping them from scratching each other. Each one took me about 5 minutes to cut and sew up, and I spread the project out over several months to keep from getting too bored.
• Lights: when I had my C9s I just stored them on the reel they came on—also made installation easy. Now, I have icicle lights. Those are trickier. But I found that a length of half-width brown painting/remodeling paper made each strand into a roll-up that kept it neat and de tangled in storage.
• Gift wrap, ribbon, etc.: Everyone probably knows about these organizers already, but I love them. I keep the Christmas one hanging in my back closet during the year and then hang it in my laundry room during the season while I’m wrapping and shipping gifts. It has lots of pockets for organizing all the bits of ribbon and gift bags I obsessively save and re-use. I just re-gifted my friend Steph the cute dog wrapping paper she wrapped my gifts in two years ago, and she was psyched to have it back. It’s sturdy stuff.
• Christmas tree waterer: this isn’t technically a storage tip, but I LOVE my HoHoHoH2O automatic tree waterer. I always cut a live tree with our local USFS thinning program, and they are thirsty customers, to the point where they’ll empty my 1-gallon reservoir overnight at the beginning of the season. This reservoir-and-pump system works great, is easy to set up and use, and is nicely disguised as a present!