It’s Almost Christmas

Tis the season to deck the halls, and the living rooms, and the dining rooms, and so on and so on. Yes, so much time and imagination goes into making our homes festive. With so much decorating going on, we often forget to think about what we are going to do after the holidays and what kind of Christmas storage options we have to keep things stored away until the following year.

Consider your options
Fortunately, there are many Christmas options available. Plastic storage bins, ornament boxes, cardboard boxes, and original packaging can all be great ways to store your Christmas decorations provided that you store things properly. A rush job at the end of Christmas means two to three times as much work when you get them out the following year.

Strive to be consistent
When choosing your Christmas storage options, we suggest that you use consistent approach to make storage easy. This means, if you are using plastic bins, buy them all the same size so they stack easily. The same goes for cardboard boxes. You might also find that keeping the original packaging for things like Christmas trees and other large items will be very helpful in storing them. If you do use different sized Christmas storage boxes, stack the heaviest and largest boxes on the bottom to avoid having them topple over.

Make good use of available space
If you have enough space in your house to store Christmas decorations in different areas, we suggest you keep all the Christmas items for a particular room or area separate from the decorations for other room or areas. This way you can pull a little out at a time without having to dig through boxes to find specific items. For instance, we store things for the family room and bedrooms in one place and the dining room, living room and kitchen in another area. If you don’t have this option, at least box items up by room and label them clearly.

A few final tips
A few other Christmas storage tips include not over packing boxes, wrap fragile items, remove all batteries and never store Christmas candles in places that get hot.

• Over-packing boxes of Christmas decorations may end up damaging ornaments and other decorations. Take the time to wrap fragile items in tissue paper. Use bubble wrap for very special decorations.
• Remove all batteries to avoid corrosion which could wreck everything in the box. There’s no point in storing things carefully if you don’t remove the batteries.
• Candles can melt in extremely hot temperatures and the waxy mess could ruin other things in the box.
• Label each box with contents and storage location. For example: For family room tree – Basement

Taking time now to organize your Christmas storage can save you hours of unnecessary work next year.