Christmas boxes are for ornaments and memories

Boxing Day, December 26, is a holiday that is celebrated differently in various countries, the exact origin of which has slipped into obscurity. A friend in England informed me that Boxing Day originated after lords of the manor houses boxed up leftover Christmas dinner for their servants. A friend in Canada told me that her family believes Boxing Day is when they “box up all the Christmas decorations.” There are probably as many Boxing Day practices and definitions as there are Boxing Day observers.

I have taken my Canadian friend’s definition to heart, but instead of boxing my decorations on December 26 I choose a random day in January. When I box up my ornaments, I begin by selecting “boxing music” – something that is definitely a boxing motivator, like the soundtrack to “Star Wars.”

The box hunt

The holiday season is a good time to find decorated boxes in assorted shapes and sizes. For closet storage I prefer decorated boxes and have found them at our local drug and grocery stores. Photo boxes are good for items stored on closet shelves. They stack in a uniform manner and can be found in several festive colors. For more inexpensive storage, cover shoeboxes with material remnants or wrapping paper. It just takes a hot glue gun and a few minutes of your time.

Plastic bins are preferable for storage in the garage and can be found in green and red. The bins are waterproof and will also ensure that nothing creepy will crawl through a crack and make its home in your gingerbread house. Many prefer clear boxes so the contents are visible. I believe that the function of labels is to identify the contents so boxes don’t need to be transparent. Also, I am not too excited about looking at strands of lights and boxes of bulbs every time I switch on my garage light. The opaque boxes have an uncluttered, uniform look. I don’t want “visions of sugarplums” in the middle of July.

It’s a wrap

Kleenex works well for wrapping individual ornaments, with the exception of bread dough ornaments. Kleenex somehow absorbs moisture and next year you will find that your bread dough ornaments have become mushy and fallen apart. Tissue paper works well with bread dough.

Purging your collection

Purge items from your collection as you repackage it for storage. Old bulbs or anything that is tattered, worn or not really old enough to be valuable can be tossed. Face it – if you don’t like an ornament and can’t even remember who gave it to you, it’s time to let it go.

However, some items with sentimental value should be kept. My mother keeps a paper Christmas tree that I cut out and crayoned when I was in first grade. It usually stays in the bottom of the box, but she knows it’s there and looks at it every year. She also kept an ornament that was made by my brother: a lovely orange construction paper circle with a cotton ball glued to the middle. My mother gave this creation to my brother’s wife a few years back and now, each year, the cotton ball ornament is proudly displayed on their Christmas tree.

Tubular wrapping paper

Wrapping paper rolls are always unwieldy; however, you can tame the beasts by storing them in a thirteen-inch-high (or taller) box. Cut off the top, cover the box with wrapping paper and stick it in a closet corner. The wrapping paper tubes can’t escape!

It’s a good idea to check to see that you don’t have a just a smidgen of paper left. It is frustrating when you pull out a roll you have stored all year only to find six inches of paper left on the tube. If you want to save that smidgen, just roll it over another tube.

Label, label, label

Label makers are easy to use but the type is rather small, so I prefer to type my own labels on the computer in bold green or red, then tape them to the boxes with clear packaging tape.

Christmas light storage

Storing Christmas lights was a problem for me; I always ended up stuffing them into a small hard-sided suitcase and had a mess to untangle each year. My mother, on the other end of the spectrum, always put her lights away in the original box. They look like they just came from the store. Since I didn’t inherit the gift of Christmas light storage from her, I find it handy to wrap the lights around small plastic devices made for extension cord storage.

Weird Christmas boxes

I have become the caretaker of a weird Christmas ornament storage box. This box once housed a Eureka vacuum cleaner, but sometime way before I was born it began to house my parents’ Christmas decorations. When I was little the box looked enormous, but every year the box became smaller and smaller – as if by magic. At about third grade I began to sneak out of bed in the middle of the night to scribble things on the box. I shared valuable information such as “Nathalie loves Russell G.” as well as other equally valuable information such as details on how to make Christmas ornaments from toilet paper tubes.

The box is now two feet high on one side and one and a half feet high on the other. Since the lid to the box disintegrated about twenty years ago I now tape a plastic garbage bag to the top, then just cut it off every year. So, why do I go to all that trouble especially when all of the other ornaments have spit-polished places of rest? That box is a family keepsake. My brother reminisces when he comes over, his children reminisce when they see it and I remember looking up at that “enormous” box and wondering if Santa Claus might be hiding inside. So, if you have a weird Christmas box like I do, just shove it against the wall in the garage, flank it with decorative green and red plastic bins and nobody will ever know the difference.