Our family loves to decorate the house for every holiday.  It makes the house feel fun and festive year round and prevents the monotony. However, there sone situation that always seems inevitable when we decorate.

We whip out the storage box for the decorations for that particular holiday, we pack everything up, and take out the decorations for the new holiday. Then a few days later we find that one decoration we forgot to take down.

We don't want to have to dig out the bin for that holiday, so we leave it to the side. We might stick in in when we take down the next holiday or it might get left out altogether. 

Come next year, we forget where we put that decoration. It doesn't get put up. Then we find it after that holiday is over. Those decorations never get used again!

Here are my tips to help prevent losing our decorations.

Clean Sweep

Take a few evenings to do a clean sweep of your decorations.  Depending on age you can enlist the help of the kiddos as well. Sort through all of your decorations and put them in the appropriate storage containers.

The bigger holidays like Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Halloween may have their own dedicated containers. Other holidays like Valentine's Day and St Patrick's Day can be consolidated into one bin. 

If you have more than one combined holiday or season bin, try to make sure that consecutive holidays are stored together.  This makes it a whole lot easier to reunite forgotten decorations with their friends when you put away the next holiday.

Clear Box It

Once you do this, all your decorations should be in the correct holiday/seasonal bins. Tis is awesome and good place to be.  However, it doesn't prevent you from missing a decoration in the future and starting the process all over again.

This is where the clear bin comes in. Get one moderate sized clear plastic bin to put with your holiday/seasonal decor. This bin should be placed in the front of your storage area and should always be easily accessible. 

When the inevitable happens, and you forget to pack a decoration, put it in the clear bin. Then as each holiday comes around, make it a point to check this bin to make sure that no miscellaneous decoration made it's way there. 

I like a clear bin because it makes it so much easier to do a quick check if anything form a particular holiday made it into the bin. 

I would love to help prevent decorations from being left out in the first place, but sometimes things happen. You start taking down decorations and then one kid spills her Cheerios and then the other kid needs help with his shoes, and then someone else is hungry and by the time you get back to it, you forget where you were. 

Getting your holiday/seasonal decor organized and then having that miscellaneous clear bin for the missed items is the next best thing to not missing a decoration in the first place. 

Do you have this problem of forgetting to put away a decoration at the end of a season?  Let me know in the comments.

Cheers,

Emily