Little project: managing Christmas decor

 Last week I did more purging in the garage.  {that's just going to be a regular task until everything I have left is something I want to keep and I know exactly where it is.}

Out went the outside Christmas lights that frustrated me so last year.  That led me to moving The Girl's things so that I had better access to my crafts dresser and the Christmas decor.  THEN, I decided to cull through the Christmas stuff and whittle it down.  Which further spurred me to go through one of those clear boxes you see and deal with the kid's ornaments and such.

Down the rabbit hole of Christmas, in May...I unwrapped them all and made piles of them on my bed - I needed a big surface for 80 plus ornaments.

There was an ornament for each kid up to age 20.  Also, some homemade ornaments and some mementos from elementary school.  And, cute ornament tie-ons they each gave to each other.

The flat paper ones went into a zip lock bag, mostly things they made in school.

These have great sentimental value.  Was it hard for me to go through them?  Yes.  A few happy tears were shed as I was going through everything.  We did have some pretty great Christmases when my kids were little.  And it turns out, summer is a better time to go through it all and organize it.

In these clear $4 boxes from Target, I placed flat things on the bottom, layered heavy to light weight ornaments, lined the boxes on the sides, then layers of crushed tissue paper all around to cushion the rest.  No sense in painstakingly wrapping each ornament, they aren't going to get jostled around.

I put everyone's initials on their box.  I'm not going to insist they take them to their respective homes, but someday they will come across these and know what they are.  And I'm letting them live in the top of my closet because I have oodles of empty space in there.

I didn't pack the stockings in there - I reserve the right to fill my peeps a stocking until they have kids of their own!  Swedish death cleaning of the Christmas decor is complete and the rest of the stuff I use fits into three storage containers that can live in the garage.

Gina