You don’t want to admit it to yourself, but the holidays are long gone. Spring is upon us and you are lying on the couch wondering who is going to magically come by and get rid of all the festive decor before Valentine’s Day gets here.
I’m sure you’re thinking to yourself what the point is of putting away stuff that took you so long to put up in the first place. I’m also sure you’re thinking to yourself that putting it all up seems pointless when you’re just going to take it all out again at the end of the year.
Here’s the truth, though. Regardless of whatever the excuse is that you’re coming up with, you just don’t feel like doing the work. You’d rather spend your time doing more important things, and that’s totally fine. I’m here to help. Here’s how you can put away holiday decorations when you are the laziest person on Earth.
All of those small ornaments and little nick-nacks don’t need to be repackaged in the boxes you purchased them in. It takes too much work to find a box for every single piece of holiday decorations. Consider just storing them together in groups.
Use Ziploc bags to contain categories of items. This way, you can organize your decorations for next year and keep them all together without having to deal with the hassle of unboxing each individual decor and planning how to categorize them around your home.
Ziploc bags are also great because you can easily write on them. You don’t need to get crafty and create labels for each item. Just write the names on the bags. Put all the bags together in a large box or container (delicately, I might add) and you’re done. It’s that easy.
Of course, it was easy to decorate initially because you had all of your favorite holiday songs playing while you decked the halls with boughs of holly. Even if you’re over holiday music, you can still create a cleaning playlist to motivate you. There is an amazing Spotify playlist titled “Spring Cleaning Motivational Songs” by Emma Beattie that will make the time fly so quickly while you’re taking holiday decorations down.
Some of my favorite songs to play while I’m cleaning are “Dog Days Are Over” by Florence + The Machine, “Shake It” by Metro Station, “We Can’t Stop” by Miley Cyrus, “Taki Taki” by DJ Snake, and “Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae Jepsen. You’ll feel much more productive if you’ve got a soundtrack to get you off the couch and dance while you clean.
Everyone’s biggest concern with holiday decorations is always the “big stupid tree.” Instead of taking your fake tree apart, and dealing with the hassle of misplaced fake branches, consider just wrapping it with saran wrap. It’s that effortless. This way, you just shove the entire thing up into the attic and it’ll be ready when Christmas rolls around again.
When you bring it back down, just use scissors and cut down one side of it. It will come off like a shell. You can also keep your ornaments on if you’re okay with storing them with the tree. Either way, this is the best strategy for any lazy person who hates dealing with a tree after the holidays are over.
If you don’t feel like doing it all by yourself, invite some friends over to help. If you want to avoid paying them or cooking for them, one clever thing you can do is to make the cleaning a competition. Make it a fun day full of activities that involve points for types of decorations that are put away. Whoever has the most points by the time everything is clean can get a prize–even if it ends up just being bragging rights.
Another cool thing you can do is to make it a drinking game. Play a holiday movie or a holiday playlist. Everyone cleans together and whenever key words like “Christmas” or “clean” come up either in conversation or in the background, you take a sip. Either way, it’s a fun way to spend time with friends and to also get your house cleaned in no time.
Believe it or not, there are community services for curbside pickup for your tree if it’s a living tree. That means you don’t even need to tie it to the top of your car again, worrying if it’ll fly off like it did before Christmas. All you need to do is remove all of the decorations and push the tree outside of your house. The pickup services will do the rest.
It’s a win-win situation, too, because those services take those living trees to recycling centers, which is a fantastic thing to happen. You’ll feel like you did your part that day to save the earth. Just do some research online so you can see if there are any pickup services near you. You’ll thank yourself later when you’ve saved some strength for the other big things going on in your life.
Stick with the theme of 12 days of Christmas. Even a fun advent calendar of your own creation can make the cleaning much more interesting. Consider dividing your home into 12 sections. Each day of your 12 days of cleaning will pertain to one of those areas. This way, you have a countdown to when your house will be officially clean of holiday decorations and it will take away the annoyance of feeling like everything needs to be cleaned in one full day.
Additionally, you can reward yourself at the end of each cleaning session. Plan out 12 rewards and arrange them from least to greatest. Each day that you clean, the reward will be greater than the one before. Soon, you’ll start looking forward to your cleaning the same way you looked forward to the holidays before it.
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