After all the time and work put into decorating your home to feel festive for the holidays, the last thing anyone wants to do when its over is to clean it all up. If you are the “Not Naturally Organized” type, you want to finally relax after all the decorating, baking, present wrapping, and entertaining you’ve done over the past few weeks or even month. And maybe think about cleaning up some other day… Go ahead and relax; whenever you decide to tackle the mess, here are a few tips to make the process easier than last year:
Take Pictures
Before tearing everything you set up apart, take some quick picture of all your decorations. While this might be a bit time consuming this year, it will save you time next year when you have photos to reference when you pull out the boxes. This will give you an easy start and can help you plan ahead by analyzing the photos before setting up to detect any spots you see where you want to add some more holiday décor!
Ornament Storage Boxes
When you start to tackle your Christmas tree, divide your ornaments based on if they are breakable or not! Remove the non-breakable ornaments first and put them in a separate box. Fragile ornaments need to be taken care of better because they can easily break. This is usually the process that people dread and can takes hours to do, not anymore because you can make an ornament storage box! Buy a few boxes, and create DIY dividers to place inside the boxes. Two popular ways to do this is cardboard dividers with little squares or lay red solo cups on the bottom of the box to place individual ornaments in. If an ornament is precious to you take extra few seconds to wrap it in tissue paper. Place the rest of them in their little cardboard square homes until next year. Take this time to get rid of ornaments you don’t love anymore and have a bag ready to put them in to bring to your local donation center.
Wrap Your Lights
There is nothing more frustrating than tangled cords. To avoid dealing with this chore next Christmas, wrap your lights around a piece of cardboard to make them easy to identify and unwrap!
Leave A Note
Write reminder notes for next year to store with your decorations. Maybe you want to remind yourself of decorations that were broken or need to be replaced. Though you might think you will remember before next year when you go to set up your tree, you will be glad to see the note before you are halfway done setting up your tree and you realize you are missing two strands of lights that broke the year before.
Whether you decide to take your décor down a few days after Christmas or a month after, we hope these tips help your holiday clean up easier this year!