4 Tips for Organizing Christmas Decor! + Free Printable

Happy New Year friends! I hope you all had a joyous holiday season! Our family was blessed with a wonderful Christmas and New Year!

So I love decorating for the holiday season {you can see my 2015 holiday home tour HERE and HERE}! All the festive lights, beautiful fresh greenery, and the pretty and sparkly decor just makes me happy.

However, I know my hoarding tendencies and my poor packing habits have finally caught up with me because decorating for the holidays have started to feel more like a chore which does not make me a happy camper.

One of my goals moving forward is to have my home better organized, my Christmas decor seem like a great place to jumpstart my organization goals!

Today I'm sharing the 4 steps I used to tackle my out-of-control Christmas decor bins.

1. Purge

I gathered all my Christmas decor bins in my dining room and starting with the decor pieces I did not use this year, I went through and tossed out anything that was broken or in poor condition. Pieces I haven't used in a while or no longer matched my style went in a donation box. Bye bye purple ornaments ?!

2. Sort

Once I was done purging I was left with only the Christmas decor that I actually like and plan to use in the future {yay!}. At this time I went around the house taking down our Christmas de r,  and gathered it all in the dining room. Now I was ready to sort!

After creating groups of  like items, I began packing the bins with items that "go" together.  For example, I put all my Christmas stockings and stocking holders into one bin.

I also combine groups when it made sense. Along with the stockings, I also have my tree skirts and other textiles like my faux fur throw I used in my Christmas Village in the same bin as the stockings.

The kids bin is another example. I have ornaments the kids have collected over the years, plus items like the Elf on the Shelf box, Christmas books, and fun things like santa hats all packed together.

3. Pack it up {the right way}!

So at this point, I've purged and sorted, plus put away like items that can go into the bins as is {like Christmas stockings and tree skirts}.  Now to pack away the smaller ornaments and decor.

I separated my smaller ornaments into two groups, non-breakable and breakable. I used two different methods to pack them up.

Non-breakable ornaments: I'm a huge fan of Ziplock bags and use them in pretty much every room of our house, so using them help organize my non-breakable ornaments was a no-brainer! I used gallon and quart size bags to organize by color, type, and size!

The clear bags will let me see everything quickly, making it easy to find exactly what I need without having to waste time digging through multiple bins. I'm giddy just thinking about it!

Breakable ornaments:  One thing I've always done is try to keep the original packaging for all my special and breakable ornaments whenever possible. It makes life a lot easier when you can just put everything back into its original packaging and put them away neatly and worry free!

For small breakable ornaments, I don't have the packaging for, I made this quick life hack plastic cup ornament holder by simply gluing plastic cups to cardboard.

My bin holds 3 sets of cardboards that have 18-20 cups each. They also sit snuggly on top of each other, so no worries about anything slipping out and breaking! *You can also add a bit of tissue paper on top for added protection if you like.

For oversized breakable ornaments I simply wrap them in tissue paper *Tip: Keep a bag handy and collect any discarded tissue paper after Christmas presents have been opened.

4. Label

Now that all my pieces are in the appropriate boxes neatly packed away, I'm going to label my boxes to make it even easier for myself next year.

I created some cute printable labels {grab your free copy below} that I printed on cardstock with the contents of each bin.

Be specific as possible when writing down the contents description. If you're anything like me you won't remember what's in these boxes by the time the holiday season rolls around again  LOL.

Let's say I'm looking for my tree skirt, I can easily identify which bin its located in.

There you have it! Everything is organized and packed away neatly and ready to be hauled up to the attic. This system will ensure moving forward packing away my Christmas decor will be a snap and decorating a joy for years to come!

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Thank you for reading and I hope you were inspired to organize your Christmas ornaments and decor this year.

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