Holiday Wrapping Storage

It's that time to start bringing out the bows, half-used rolls of wrapping paper, un-sorted tissue paper, stray gift tags, and of course the yards and yards of ribbon. If you're like most people you probably have an area or maybe even a box that you throw all of your holiday wrapping paraphernalia into and forget about it until the next holiday season. I find that it makes it a lot easier to get motivated to wrap gifts if you have your gift wrappings in a more orderly way so that it takes less effort to get to everything.

Before I go any farther I must introduce you to my family's method of gift wrap storage as I was growing up. The method is/was: having an overwhelmingly enormous pile designated for gift wrapping. This drove me absolutely insane, as I am someone who is a bit compulsive when it comes to organizing. Every year around the holidays I would go into that bottomless pit and organize the wrapping paper to prepare to wrap my gifts, only to find that the next time I opened that door it was back to being a mess again. Needless to say, I soon became an expert gift wrapping organizer... Now if only I could have gotten my family to maintain an organized area.

I am a huge fan of clear plastic storage containers. My idea of a perfectly organized holiday wrapping storage area would be a whole bunch of different size storage containers with nice, neat labels. The separation of the larger items such as bags and boxes from the smaller items is one of the key points to take away.

MISCELLANEOUS ITEMS: I would use smaller shoebox size containers (or even a shoe box would work!) to house my loose bows, spools of ribbon, gift tags and of course several rolls of tape and a pair of scissors (which always seem to disappear at the most inopportune times).

WRAPPING PAPER: I love the idea of a very large (long but low) container to store wrapping paper since it has kind of an awkward long size to it, but if that doesn't work for you consider a tall cardboard box where you can stand up your rolls of paper. I generally store my tissue paper with the wrapping paper.

BOXES: We've all got a collection of gift boxes that either came with purchases or gifts we have received. What the heck do we do with all of these boxes? I suggest you keep them because you never know when they'll come in handy to help you wrap gifts. I have boxes of so many varying sizes it's hard to keep them straight! I use another large container (consider doubling the wrapping paper container with the box container) and break down the boxes so they lay flat inside. For the nicer, decorative boxes that do not break down I stack them inside of each other to save space.

BAGS: My collection of holiday gift bags outnumbers my box collection by a lot. I keep my holiday bags stored either in my box container or my wrapping paper container and find that the combination works out well. Another alternative would be to use a very large gift bag and store the remaining smaller bags inside of it. I find this works very well and looks nice because you can always see the pretty decorative bag displayed on your shelf.

The key with this is to not let it get too unorganized. I mentioned when I was growing up how I was the only one who organized everything and no one seemed to put anything where it went. This is a real problem and leads to overwhelming clutter and can be very difficult to motivate yourself to create order in a space like that. My very best advice is that after you create an organizational system in an area to follow it. Just because you adopt a system to organize doesn't mean you are organized. You must follow your organizational system to maintain organization.