According to her "wall" on FaceBook, my friend Lisa has already taken down her tree, while my sister wrote me a couple hours ago to tell me that she's taking hers down tomorrow. As far as I'm concerned, December 27 or 28 is, let's see, about 3O days too early to take down a Christmas tree, but what do I know? In my local Target, clerks were putting out Valentine's Day candy yesterday, and it's not even New Year's yet.
In order to keep up with the rush-rush trend, I thought I'd better hurry up and write about ornament storage, never mind that I won't be storing mine anytime soon. Happily, I was so enthralled by my ornament storage box when I first got it in 2OO2 that I took before-and-after pictures, even though at the time I didn't know what a "blog" was, or that I would ever find a useful outlet for my documentation compulsion.
Before I got the wonderful ornament storage box, I kept my ornaments in various random boxes, some of which I'd invariably forget about until I'd be half-way through trimming the tree and realize that my Snoopy ornament or favorite papier mache bulb was nowhere to be found. The advantage to the storage box was immediate:
- It was big enough for all my ornaments to fit in one place. (Note: I have well over 1OO ornaments. )
- It came with corrugated dividers that help keep the ornaments tidy.
- You can fold the corrugated dividers back in order to fit oversize ornaments.
- The brightly-colored box is easy to identify.
Before, above left: The crank-inducing messy ornament storage; after above right: the glorious ornament storage box, complete with corrugated dividers.
The product description on the Container Store site states an ornament-occupancy limit of 75, which is probably true for bulbs. Most of my ornaments are smaller, thus I can fit all 1OO+ in the box with room to spare. I like to wrap the ornaments up in brightly-colored tissue paper--it makes the otherwise depressing task of putting away the ornaments almost as much fun as I'll have taking them out again next year.
