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How to Store Holiday Decorations So They Survive the Year

Half of what I put away last January came out unusable this year. What am I doing wrong at the packing-up end?

6 minute read.

Dry is the whole thing

If you take one instruction from this page, it is this one, and it is the one that costs the most to ignore.

A decoration comes down in January damp, because January. It goes into a plastic tote. The lid goes on. That tote is now a sealed humid container that will sit at room temperature in a garage for eleven months, which is a specification for growing mould rather than for storing things.

On an inflatable this is terminal. The mould grows into the coating on the fabric, it stains through, and it does not come out. The piece is also then unpleasant to be near, which matters more than it sounds like it should when you unpack it in a garage in October.

Drying an inflatable properly means running it — inflate it somewhere sheltered on a dry day and leave the blower going for an hour, which dries the inside as well as the outside. Draping it over something for an afternoon dries one surface and traps the rest. This is the step people skip and it is the step that matters.

Everything else follows the same rule. Wire figures dry in an hour. Plywood needs a genuinely dry day or it will go away with moisture in the end grain, which is how edges delaminate.

What kills what

Where, which matters more than what you store it in

An unheated garage or a shed is where nearly everything ends up, and it is acceptable for most things provided they went in dry. The enemy there is the daily temperature swing, which drives condensation: a container that warms in the afternoon and cools at night moves moisture around inside itself.

An attic is worse than people think. Summer attic temperatures wreck vinyl and soften adhesives, and an inflatable that has spent a July up there comes down with its seams tackier than they went up.

A basement is better for temperature and worse for humidity. If the basement is dry, it is the best of the three.

Get boxes off a concrete floor whatever the space. Concrete wicks moisture continuously and the bottom inch of everything stacked on it is in a different climate from the rest. A pallet, a shelf or two lengths of 2x4 solves it entirely.

And bring the animatronics indoors. They are the most expensive things in the pile and the least tolerant of damp, and they are usually small enough to live in a closet.

The twenty minutes in January that saves an hour in October

Label by where it goes, not by what it is. "Front left flank" beats "reindeer", because next October you will be reconstructing an arrangement rather than an inventory.

Photograph the yard before you take it down, from the sidewalk, at night and lit. Everybody thinks they will remember the arrangement and nobody does. The photo is also the thing that tells you honestly what looked good, which you cannot judge while you are in the middle of building it.

Bag each piece's own stakes, tethers and hardware with the piece, in a labelled bag inside the box. Loose hardware in the bottom of a tote becomes hardware that belongs to nothing by next year, and the tethers are the part that stops the inflatable blowing over.

Write down what failed and what you wished you had. A note in the box saying "one more 50 ft run would have finished the fence line" is worth a great deal in the week after the holiday, when the same thing is 70 per cent off.

Where this usually goes wrong

Packing an inflatable away damp

The single most expensive storage mistake there is. Mould grows into the fabric coating within a month and does not come out. Run the blower for an hour on a dry day first — that dries the inside, which draping it over a rail does not.

Winding light strands tight

Tight winding puts a fatigue bend at every turn, and copper that has been held bent for eleven months fails at those points. Loose figure-eight coils cost nothing and no time.

Vacuum-bagging an inflatable to save space

It saves a lot of space and it creases the coated fabric hard along the fold lines, which is where they eventually split. Loose in a breathable bag is the trade worth making.

Storing boxes directly on a concrete floor

Concrete wicks moisture up into whatever sits on it all year. Two lengths of 2x4 under a stack removes the problem completely and costs nothing.

Loose hardware in the bottom of the tote

By October the stakes and tethers belong to nothing identifiable, and the tethers are the part that keeps the inflatable upright. Bag them with their own piece.