I am sad to see it go but I am relieved to get a little resemblance of order back in my house. I am still working on finding homes for a few toys, but the rest of Christmas has been packed away and cleaned up. I have been on an organizing streak the last couple of days and it feels great! If you haven’t packed up those decorations yet here are a few tips and hopefully a little motivation to get you jump started.
Weed Out The Unused. Does that singing Santa drive you crazy but you keep it anyways because someone gave it to you? If you find yourself with decorations that you don’t use or love feel free to let them go. Don’t go through the headache of re-packing them each year. Save yourself the space by donating the items you don’t want to keep.
Protect The Breakables. Find creative ways to pack things. I use our stockings and Christmas towels to wrap up the more fragile decorations if I don’t have bubble wrap or other packing material on hand. For extra fragile items I keep the original box the item came in.
Organize The Ornaments. We have a fabulous ornament storage box that we used to store some of our ornaments in this year. The rest of our ornaments usually get stored in their original packaging. No sense in adding to the landfills. The packaging, especially if it is a box, will work for quite a few years. If you pick up ornaments that don’t have packaging think of things you have around the house to wrap them up in like grocery bags or paper towels. Egg cartons would work great for containing smaller ornaments!
Maximize Your Storage Space. When storing decorations like wreaths in a bin use all of the storage space available. I stored our stocking hangers in the open circle of the wreath. Then I packed lighter items like fake greens and pine cones on top of the wreaths so they would not get squished and out of shape.
Take Out The Guess Work. At the very least label your containers with “Christmas Decorations” or “Christmas Ornaments”. To take out the guess work label them with more descriptive identifiers like “Tabletop Christmas Decor” or “Mantle Decorations”. If you really want to take it up a notch, take pictures before you pack the decorations away so you know exactly where everything goes next year when you take it out.
Most importantly, have fun with it. Organizing doesn’t have to be a dreaded chore. Get the family to help and time will fly. Don’t beat yourself up if you haven’t packed things up yet, after all if you were too busy spending time with family it was wort it!
So let’s be honest, we are now 3 days into the New Year, how many of you still have up your tree? Or are you the take it down on the day after Christmas type?
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We were traveling out of town for the New Year so the decor and the tree came down the Sunday after Christmas. A little sad, but for the best really. The tree was starting to become a real fire hazard.
Typically I keep the tree up until New Years Day (often a bit longer) but this year I had enough. I got everything packed away on the 27th – including the outdoor lights as well. I have to say – it felt good to have everything put away and the job finished.
I just finished putting my things away this afternoon. I have two trees; the “fancy” one in the living room, and the “fun” one in the den. I used ornament boxes for each of them, and put all related items in a larger plastic bin for each room. I labeled everything based on what was in the bin and which room it belonged to; I had two bins – one for pine garland and the other for pine wreaths and adjustable branches. The final two bins were for my collections of Christmas trees, snowmen, and reindeer. I took 2 full boxes and 4 plastic bags full of Christmas decor to Goodwill. It feels GREAT!!! Happy New Year!
Just got the tree taken down last night. I was sad to see it go, but got a very distinct pleasure in the very organized process of putting everything back in it’s special places. I have two bins: one for ornaments and tree skirt, one for the rest of the decorations. Given my home’s tiny teeny size, that’s about all I can handle.
I always pack mine up right away. This year I got a little crazy about the amount of Christmas storage tubs. One per tree (2) and one for the stockings, other decor, advent activities, etc. Is that reasonable or am I fooling myself?
It just depends on the size of the house. I had 8 bins and I don’t decorate anything upstairs. Downstairs isn’t over decorated either! The funny thing is that I have hardly bought any decorations except for ornaments and a wreath this year. My grandmother buys a couple of new items every year on sale and gives us her stuff form the year before. I love it!
I did manage to get the tree down and the tree decorations put away but that was only because they were chipping trees at our local bike path on Saturday and we needed to get it there on that day or we get stuck with no where to dispose of it. The other decorations will be put away tomorrow.
In Sweden we usually take the Christmas stuff down on the 13th of January, 20 days after Christmas eve. If you can put up with it of course ;) The cleaning out is also celebrated with a party, “Christmas tree plundering” (julgransplundring), where all the edible ornaments gets eaten, dancing around the tree and a lot of fun and games. I haven’t done this since I was little, but it was great fun at the time.
Sounds wonderful, in that case I would leave mine up too! My oldest sons birthday is January 10th so we try to make sure it is down by then. My youngest son’s birthday is December 8th and the tree is already up by then. I try to make sure when taking pictures for his birthday that I don’t get the tree in the background! I try to make it feel like their birthdays are not so intertwined with Christmas.
I didn’t manage to get the tree and other decorations down before we went out of town for the weekend, so that’s my plan for this weekend (with hubbie’s help, of course). However, I think I may need to add an additional tub this year, as I’ve been cramming things into the current ONE for the last few years, and I have a feeling we’ve added more decorations this year… or I could donate a few random decorations that don’t really have homes in our house to make room for the new!
My grandmother gave us some new items this year so I had to make room for them. I actually got rid of the singing Santa! :)
I had to get all the new toys and gifts put away. My Christmas decorations stay up until Jan 6. Packing up Christmas is always sad to me, but I love getting my house back to “normal”!!!
@juliebavi