STORING CHRISTMAS ORNAMENTS

 

Christmas ornament storage is an important (and often poorly executed) part of holiday decoration breakdown.  Since ornaments are often as fragile and expensive as they are sentimentally valuable it’s important to use caution and care when putting them away.  The following tips can help you protect your Christmas ornaments and organize them logically to make next years tree trimming simpler.

First, like any other type of packing, if you still have the original boxes for your Christmas ornaments, use them, they offer the best protection.  If not, newsprint, shredded Christmas wrapping paper or acid free paper work well as a cushion for your ornaments.

Probably, the biggest challenge when storing Christmas ornaments is keeping the ornaments protected and separated.  A series of small boxes packed tightly and combined into a larger carton works well or shallow box or plastic tub packed with just one layer of ornaments serves the same purpose.  The idea of both is to keep the weight of layers of ornaments off of the bottom layer.  Another good method to keep ornaments safe is to use corrugated dish pack separators to create cells for each individual ornament.  Most of the time these cardboard grids are used for separating glasses in a dish pack box but the concept also works great for Christmas ornaments. Just make sure to protect each ornament inside it’s cell with packing material so the ornaments don’t rattle around.

 For the sake of organization tag your storage boxes with an inventory of what inside them.  If you use tubs color code them all the same (red for Christmas) so it’s easy to identify each holiday box or tub.  Like with other Christmas decoration storage or holiday decoration storage keep things together in groups by style, area, or function and spend enough time marking and organizing when taking ornaments down.  The time spent on the “take down” will save time and frustration next year on the set up. 

Finally, like with all other storage, if your Christmas ornaments are temperature or humidity sensitive, be careful of where you store them.  Attics and basements (if not property ventilated and temperature regulated) aren’t always the best option if they have dramatic changes in environment.  Large fluctuations in temperature and or humidity can cause damage to the ornaments and even mold growth.  These tips should help when you are packing and storing Christmas ornaments.