Of course, putting up the festive decorations is always fun, but we also enjoy buying new ones every year when our Christmas schedules are already incredibly tight. For this reason, once Christmas is over, many of us like to place our decorations into storage for retrieving next year.
However, if you rush this stage, you could inadvertently damage those decorations, therefore rather blunting the point of keeping them in the first place. Here are some tips to prevent this from happening.
Store in clear bags or boxes
Good Housekeeping suggests using clear gallon bags from the kitchen to sort your ornaments by colour while keeping them in the same container.
For some decorations, you could use clear storage jars, which don’t strictly have to go into the attic. Instead, as Ideal Home shows, you could put them on the mantelpiece for an attractive display.
It’s a wrap, or it’s in the bag – your tree, that is
Your artificial tree’s original box might initially seem like its ideal hibernation retreat, but this isn’t necessarily the case. As The Spruce warns, cardboard boxes tend to deteriorate and so, over time, become increasingly vulnerable to insect infestation.
The site advocates using a commercially available Christmas tree bag instead, while shrink wrapping the tree is another option for effectively protecting it.
Segment your ornaments among separate plastic cups
One problem with simply placing all of your ornaments loosely together in a large box is that some of those pieces could become inadvertently crushed.
To counter this possibility, try gathering all of the plastic cups left over from festive parties, glueing them bottom-down to a piece of cardboard and then placing delicate ornaments into the cups.
Cut up old Christmas cards into gift tags
Once the festive season has elapsed, remove your cards before cutting them up into separate tags for attaching, with ribbon and string, to your presents next year.
Shred used wrapping paper to repurpose it as packing filler
Can you even begin to imagine the amount of gift wrapping simply thrown out every Christmas? It seems like such a waste – and, though you can reduce your own wastage by sending your wrapping paper off to be recycled, it would be even better for you to simply reuse it instead.
Fortunately, you can do that relatively easily by putting the paper through a paper shredder, with the resulting strips useful as packing filler when you are storing other decorations.
Hang delicate baubles in the open
If some of your baubles would look nice hung up in rooms other than your loft, you could indeed decorate with them in this way, such as by hanging them near clothes in your wardrobe.
Mark this box as Box 1…
What box? The one containing your advent calendar, Christmas cards and tree stand, as you will want to fetch this box first next Christmas. Nonetheless, as it’s not the only box you will ultimately need, having a permanent loft ladder fitted by a firm like Instaloft could prove hugely useful.
