Tis the season for decorating, and more seasons for decorating are just around the corner. Between ghosts and turkeys, black cats and snowflakes, the fall and winter seasons are jam-packed with decorating opportunities, enough to overwhelm!
Space is always limited, it seems, no matter how large your home might be. How can you accommodate seasonal decorations without causing mass chaos? It seems easy to throw everything into a closet at the end of the season, but do you end up buying more decorations because you can’t find the old ones? It is also nice to have a store of fond memories: decorations made in years gone by.
The simple answer is that you need to create a dedicated space in your home for these decorations, and this space needs to be organized. I organize mine using big plastic bins. I have a bin for each season, including summer. I have three bins for Christmas decorating. Each bin is labeled with the name of the season so that I don’t need to dig around the stack. This takes up a large closet in my basement, but it’s worth it.
What goes in the bins? Outdoor decorations and doorway decorations and indoor decorations go in the bin. Store-bought decorations, or most likely homemade, garage sale, and sale decorations go in the bin. Seasonal pillow covers for our couch also go int the bin to decorate our throw pillows. Over the past two years, I have bought very few decorations because we’re currently full. That’s the other advantage of a bin: it provides you with an automatic space limitation.
For Christmas, I have three bins. One is the advent bin for items that I want to take out on December 1st. Another is the outdoor bin, mostly easy-to-store LED lights. The other is the indoor bin, for the time closer to Christmas when I want to add extra home decorations. We also save bags and wrapping paper in a birthday and Christmas bin so we can reuse them.
Every year when I open up the bin, I see items that we don’t use. We send them off to charity or recycle them. Eventually, I hope that the bin with have my daughter’s artwork and a simple and appropriate selection of decorations for each part of the year.