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Christmas storage labels

Decoration boxes get opened once a year, which is exactly long enough to forget what is in them. A label written in January is a present to yourself next December.

Label them on the way down, not on the way up

Almost everyone labels decorations while putting them up, when the boxes are already open and the contents are on the floor. The useful moment is the opposite one: while packing them away, when you can see exactly what is going into each box and you have just spent an evening discovering what was wrong with last year's labels.

It is also the only moment you will remember that the star does not fit in the box marked "tree topper", or that one string of lights has a dead section a third of the way along.

What to write on each box

"Christmas" on six identical boxes is the same as writing nothing. The three things worth recording are where the contents go, whether the box is fragile, and anything that will not be obvious in eleven months.

• Sort by room, not by object type. "Living room — mantelpiece and tree" beats "Ornaments", because it tells you which box to carry where before you open anything.
• Say what is fragile, and on two sides of the box. Only one side will be facing you when it comes down from the loft.
• Note the awkward things. "Lights — 2 sets, outdoor, one has a dead section" is worth more next year than any amount of tidy handwriting.
• Record the counts that matter. How many strings of lights, how many stockings. It is how you notice something did not make it back into the box.
• Add the year you packed it. It quietly tells you which ornaments have not come out for three Decembers.

That is exactly what the box contents sheet mode produces: one page per box, an item per line, and a note after a dash. End a line with a colon and it starts a new box on a new page, so one paste can produce a sheet for every box in the loft.

Packing the fragile things

• Glass baubles keep best individually wrapped, standing in a divided box. Egg boxes and apple trays work; newspaper transfers ink onto pale ceramic, so use plain tissue for anything light-coloured.
• Lights tangle unless they are wound onto something. A rectangle of stiff card with a notch cut at each end takes a whole string and stops the knots. Label the card as well as the box, so the outdoor set and the tree set stay distinguishable.
• Wreaths and garlands crush flat under weight. Give them their own shallow box and put it on top of the stack, not underneath.
• Artificial trees are usually the reason the loft hatch is the constraint. Note the branch order on a label inside the bag if the sections are not colour-coded.
• Candles should not share a loft with anything that matters in summer. They bend.

Cold, damp and lofts

Most decoration storage happens in a loft, a garage or under the stairs, and each has its own failure mode. Lofts swing between freezing and very hot, which warps candles and makes old sticky tape let go. Garages are damp, and cardboard wicks moisture from a concrete floor — a pallet or a couple of battens underneath solves most of it. If you are using lidded plastic crates rather than cardboard, put the label on the end you will actually see when they are stacked.

Paper labels last perfectly well in these places for a year. A strip of clear tape over the top makes them last several.

Print them

The Christmas style is one of four seasonal artworks in the label maker, alongside Autumn, Halloween and New Year. It prints in any of eight paper sizes, from a full A4 contents sheet down to a small label for a crate end. The artwork is drawn as line work rather than solid fill, so it survives being printed in greyscale on a home printer.

If you would rather have tick-boxes than labels — for a "what still needs putting away" list on the last day — checklist mode does that from the same page.

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