Tips To Organizing Christmas Decorations

I spent this past weekend putting away my Christmas decorations. Am I late or what? Yeah, well, I got a wee bit sick earlier this week, so everything got backed up around our house. But now I’m all done and cleared of the Christmas holiday! Yay!

This was actually our first year fully decorating our house for the holidays. We bought a bunch of ornaments and decor from Boxing Day 2011 and kept them in storage to be used for the first time in 2012. Why buy Christmas decorations at full price? Everything will go on half price and more on the 26th! I did the same Boxing Day shopping last month - Christmas shopping in preparation for NEXT year. Now that our Christmas decorations are building up, I thought it was time to get them properly organized before they get out of control. Here are a couple of things that I did that might interest you…

My Beautiful Containers

Firstly, I bought some red/green plastic translucent containers from Wal-Mart ($8 each in Canada, $5 each in US - bah humbug! as I purchased mine in Canada before I knew how much they cost in the US). Then I labeled them. As I am quite attracted to labels or titles that aren’t obvious (i.e. Google, Apple), I gave random holiday names to my containers that didn’t specify what the contents were.

The labels were printed from here, a site that I found through Pinterest. I love how cheery and colorful these images make the boxes look.

How I Kept The Lights Tangled-Free
(this works for garlands too)

Then the boards were filed into my plastic containers. I wrapped my lights and garlands around these boards. They look so organized in the containers - and best of all, tangle-free! You can also write the length of the light or garland on the edge of the boards. Oh! And when it’s time to take out the decorations in December, you can plug in the lights on the board and see at a glance which ones are burnt out and needs replacing. Speaking of, you could also tape the extra light bulbs to the edge of these boards. Love organizing my lights and garlands this way.

The gold garland on the upper left is wire, so it wouldn’t wrap around the boards as well. I decided to wrap the short cuts of garland around a tin can and kept the rest in its original packaging. The wire wraps around the round object much better!

Storing Floral Spray

(Unfortunately, I don’t have a photo of this - sorry. *sheepish grin*)

Do you have artificial flowers or berry branches? I just bought my first ones this past season. I stored mine by keeping all the similar styles together, unbent any branches or leaves that were bent during the display, then wrapped each bundle up in tissue like fresh flowers. Each bundle was laid in the containers amongst my holiday ribbons and vase fillers.

Storing Ornaments

I’ve seen some creative ways to organize ornaments, including gluing a series of plastic cups to a sheet of cardboard to hold ornaments individually. While I think that idea is extremely clever, I didn’t think it was necessary for my purposes. See, 90% of my ornaments are shatterproof. I don’t need to worry about them getting knocked around and chipping because they’re not very fragile. So I decided that the best method for me was to just dump all the ornaments together, organized by color. Since I don’t have more than 75 ornaments of one color, I couldn’t justify using a whole 18″W x 24″L x 11″H container for that one color. That’s when I decided I needed a board of some type to separate several colors in one container. Thank goodness I had so much cardboard on hand.

Any ornaments that were of a fragile nature were wrapped in tissue and gently placed in the appropriate color category. I did secure the separators with some tape because they tended to tip over in the box.

And the pièce de résistance…

As I believe certain items can be used for various occasions throughout the year (ribbons, vase fillers, lights, garlands, floral sprays, etc), I wanted to be certain I knew where to find them without having to dig through every box (especially since I didn’t label the boxes very obviously). I created a binder documenting all the holiday decor items in these boxes. Here’s a sample of one of the pages:

This binder will be very helpful should I need to do any shopping when the holiday season approaches. You’d be surprised how many things I had forgotten that I bought on Boxing Day 2011! This will remind me that I don’t need any more silver ornaments or if I have the right variety of ornaments.

What other ways do you keep your decorations organized? I’d love to hear them! Nonetheless, I hope I was able to inspire some new ideas for you in today’s post.

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