organizing your ornaments

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Believe it or not, Christmas is over. Seemed like it all flew by. It was an INCREDIBLE holiday. Definitely the best we’ve had since the accident. We haven’t taken our tree down yet, I’m trying to savor all that’s left of the magic. I usually have the itch to take it down by now, but we scaled way down on everything all year long, and Christmas was no exception. I wanted to share with you how I organize my ornaments every year though!

Our tree isn’t fancy with white lights and red and silver ornaments. No, ours holds generations of memories. Ornaments that hung on my grandma’s tree. Ornaments that Andrew and I received growing up. Ornaments we have picked up from our travels. Many of our ornaments were my Mama’s, and I have her twinkling “chasing” lights on our tree as well.

I’ve shared before how I live in fear of something happening to me, especially for Elizabeth’s sake. And our Christmas ornaments are so special to us, that if anything should happen to me, I would want Elizabeth to know their origin and meaning!

I bought these plastic shoe storage boxes at Walmart for $2.00 each. I didn’t take time to print labels, I just wrote on them. There are boxes for my mom’s ornaments, mine and Andrew’s together (ornaments we have collected together from trips, our first home, marriage, etc), Elizabeth’s, our childhood ornaments, etc. I also have a box not pictured of CJ’s childhood ornaments and a box of Mom’s gingerbread ornaments, that I don’t use on the tree.

I labeled the really special ones before I put them in the boxes.

Growing up, we always got to open 1 present on Christmas Eve. It always had new pajamas and an ornament in it, and now we do the same for Elizabeth. All the ornaments are labeled on the back.

The fragile ones are wrapped in tissue paper, and then they’re all placed in these shoe boxes and placed in the big storage tote.

So tell me, when do you pack away all of your ornaments and holiday magic?!