The presents are unwrapped, the boxes are emptied of their contents, and tissue paper is strewn about the room. Time to clean up from all the holiday merriment; but don’t be too hasty to throw out the tissue paper and empty boxes – recycle them. This article will give you some “ah ha” ideas for storing holiday decorations, and self storage is a convenient place to holiday items when the season is over.

Ornaments

• Run used gift wrap and tissue paper through a paper shredder and use the fluffy strips as filler.
• Keep fragile ornaments at the top of a box.
• Egg cartons are perfect for tiny ornaments.
• Have a partitioned cardboard wine box? Use it to store tissue-wrapped ornaments. Several ornaments can be stacked on top of each other in each slot.
• Reuse a shirt box or shoebox to store ornament hangers. Fill it with hooks, rolls of small ribbon, cording, scissors, twist ties and craft wire – everything you’d need to replace the inevitable lost hanger.
• Store food-based decorations (like the cinnamon and applesauce ornaments your kids bring home from school) in sandwich bags to protect them from humidity, and then place the bags in an empty cookie tin to keep rodents out.

Garland

• Store bulky garlands in large plastic storage boxes. You can push a lot into a big box, since there’s nothing to break, and the garlands can be fluffed out.
• Mark the center of a long swag with a colored twist tie before you remove it so you won’t have to measure it again next year.
• Label segments of garland with a pen and masking tape as you take it down so you’ll always know which piece to hang in the entryway and which is just the right size for the mantel.

Lights

• Instead of coiling your lights in a bundle that somehow turns into a big tangled ball, wrap them around empty wrapping paper tubes and tape the ends of the string to the tube.
• Put extra bulbs and fuses in a sandwich bag and place inside the tube.