Most Easter decorations are not lost. They are put somewhere in April, forgotten, and then found the following March crushed, damp or tangled beyond saving. The decorations were fine. The storage was the problem.
Putting them away properly takes about an hour once a year, and it is the difference between decorations you can put straight back up next spring and decorations you have to replace.
When they come down is up to you: when the school Easter holidays end or, if you follow the church calendar, when the Easter season ends at Pentecost, fifty days after Easter Day. Either way, pick a dry day to pack them.
Why decorations die in storage
Three things do almost all the damage, and all three are about where you put the box rather than what is in it.
- Temperature swings. A British loft goes from near-freezing in winter to genuinely hot under a slate roof in summer. Repeated expansion and contraction makes paper brittle, warps card, and dries out glue.
- Damp. Garages, sheds, cellars and lofts with poor ventilation all hold moisture. Paper absorbs it, foils tarnish, and anything natural grows mould.
- Crushing. The commonest of the three. Everything goes in one big box, the heavy things end up on top, and the delicate things spend eleven months underneath them.
How to store Easter decorations: the one-hour method
- Sort before you pack. Lay everything on a table. Anything broken, faded or that you did not put up this year does not go back in the box.
- Clean and dry everything. Dust with a dry cloth or a soft brush. Anything even slightly damp can be mouldy by next spring. This is the step people skip and regret.
- Separate by material, not by where it was used. Paper with paper, foil with foil. Materials fail in different ways and want different treatment.
- Pack flat things flat and fragile things rigid. Detail below.
- Label the outside with what is inside, not just "EASTER".
- Put it somewhere at room temperature. This matters more than the box you chose.
By material
Honeycomb paper decorations
These are the easiest thing in the box, because they are made to fold flat. A honeycomb piece opens out into a three-dimensional shape and closes back to flat. Most of ours have a hidden magnetic closure, so folding down is the same motion in reverse, with nothing to unclip or untape.
Store them flat and lightly weighted: a large envelope, a document wallet, or between two sheets of card in a shallow drawer. Do not roll them, do not store them opened out, and do not put anything heavy on top. A folded honeycomb set is thin enough to live in a drawer rather than a loft box, which conveniently also solves the temperature problem. Choose a drawer that young children and pets cannot get into.
Safety: our honeycomb decorations contain magnets. They are a decoration, not a toy. Keep them out of reach of young children and pets, and if a magnet is swallowed, get medical help straight away. The Office for Product Safety and Standards says the same in its product safety alert on magnets: act fast to get medical treatment if you think a magnet has been swallowed.
Paper mâché eggs and hanging decorations
Rigid box, lid on, and untangle the hanging loops before they go in: a knot of threads left for a year becomes a knot you cut. Lay them side by side if you have the space; if you have to stack them, put a sheet of tissue between each level.
Keep them somewhere dry. Paper mâché and damp do not coexist, which is the same reason our paper mâché bowls are for dry use only (there is a list of what not to put in a paper mâché bowl). There is more on the material in how to look after paper mâché.
Real eggshells, blown and painted
An egg carton is the correct storage and it is free. One egg per cup, carton closed, carton on top of everything else rather than underneath.
Wicker, moss, dried flowers and anything natural
These are the mould risk. Bone dry before packing, and give them air: a cardboard box or a paper bag, never a zipped plastic bag, which traps whatever moisture is already in the material.
Foil, plastic and painted metal
Wrap individually in tissue so painted surfaces do not rub against each other. Plastic against plastic in a warm loft can stick together permanently.
Fabric bunting and table linen
Wash, dry completely, fold rather than scrunch, and store away from light so colours do not fade along the fold lines.
Where to store Easter decorations
Ranked, best first, for a normal British house:
- A drawer or wardrobe shelf indoors. Stable temperature, dry, easy to reach. Ideal for anything that folds flat.
- Under a bed. Shallow lidded boxes are made for this. Dry, dark, and no crushing.
- Top of a wardrobe or a cupboard above the stairs. Fine for rigid boxes.
- The loft. Acceptable only for robust, non-paper items in rigid boxes with tight lids, and only if it is dry.
- Garage, shed or cellar. Avoid for anything paper. Damp, temperature swings and, in many sheds, mice.
If you take one thing from this: paper decorations belong inside the heated part of the house. They take almost no room once they are flat.
Boxes: what actually works
- Clear rigid plastic with a clip lid. The best all-rounder: you can see the contents, it stacks, and it keeps its shape.
- Shallow beats deep. A deep box means things at the bottom get crushed. Two shallow boxes are better than one tall one.
- Cardboard is fine indoors and better than plastic for natural materials, because it breathes.
- Skip the vacuum bags. They are for duvets. Compressing paper and wicker is how you break them.
- Tissue paper, not newspaper. Newsprint transfers on to painted surfaces over a year.
Label it properly
Write what is in the box, and write it on the side rather than the lid so you can read it on a shelf. "Easter: honeycomb (contains magnets), paper mâché eggs, fragile" tells you whether you need this box. "EASTER" tells you nothing and means you open all three. Writing "contains magnets" on the side also tells everyone else in the house that this box is one to keep away from young children and pets.
Worth adding: a note of what you ran out of. Next March you will not remember that you were two place settings short.
What to throw away
Be decisive in April, because you will not be in March. Anything crushed out of shape, faded, mouldy, or that you did not put up this year. Storage space is the constraint, and keeping a box of decorations you dislike is what stops you buying the ones you would use.
Buying with storage in mind
It is worth thinking about this before you buy rather than after. A decoration that folds flat, has no loose parts to lose and can be put away in the state it arrived in is quicker to pack and easier to keep in good condition than one that has to be wrapped piece by piece every year.
That is the thinking behind our honeycomb Easter decorations, which are made by hand: they open into a three-dimensional shape and fold back to flat, and stored flat and dry, they can come out again next Easter. They contain magnets, so treat them as a decoration, not a toy, and keep them out of reach of young children and pets.
Our paper mâché Easter eggs are also made by hand and sold as hanging sets. They want a rigid box with a lid, and if they come out of storage dry and undamaged, they can go back up the following spring.
For what to do with them once they are out again, read our Easter decoration ideas for the tree and the table.
