For twenty-four years I packed my Christmas ornaments into the same two cardboard boxes and a grocery bag. Newspaper between the layers, tape across the top, up on a basement shelf. Every January I opened those boxes and found the same thing: one or two cracked ornaments, a little glitter in the bottom, and a mess to sort through before I could put anything away. I told myself it was fine because the ornaments were old and not expensive. It was not fine. It was a cardboard box doing a job a cardboard box was never made to do.
Last January I bought a ZOBER ornament storage box, the fabric kind with dividers and a zipper, and gave it one job: hold my ornaments through the off season and hand them back in November the way I put them in. It has been through one pack-away and one unpacking. That is not a long test and I will say so where it matters. But it solved the problem that had been costing me an ornament or two a year, and it solved it the first January.
Fifty ornaments, fifty-four slots, one box to carry up the stairs
The ZOBER box stores 54 three-inch ornaments in divided slots, measures 24 by 12 by 12 inches, and has a card slot on the outside for a label. It slides onto a basement shelf beside the tree box.
Amazon Check Today's Price on Amazon →Every ornament gets its own slot instead of a nest of newspaper
The box has 54 divided compartments, and each one holds a single ornament. Mine are the round glass kind, about three inches across, and they drop in and lift out without me digging. That sounds like a small thing until you have spent twenty minutes working a hook out of a wad of newsprint. The listing names 54 three-inch ornaments, and that is the size I can actually vouch for from my own box.
The January cracks stopped
Every year before this one I lost an ornament or two. Nothing dramatic, just a hairline crack in a glass ball that shows up when the tree lights hit it, or a cap that worked loose. Those ornaments were sitting against each other in a box with nothing between them. Dividers do the one job newspaper was pretending to do. One pack-away, no cracks. Small sample, I know. It is also the first January in a long time that I did not put anything in the trash.
It fits the shelf I already had
The box measures 24 inches long, 12 wide and 12 high. My basement shelves were built for banker's boxes, so it slides in with room to spare in front of it. I did not have to rebuild storage or buy a shelving unit to make a place for it. It sits on the shelf, never on the floor, because the fabric is not waterproof and a basement floor is a basement floor. That one rule has kept it dry through a wet Ohio spring.
The card slot ends the November guesswork
There is a small card slot on the outside of the box made for a label. I wrote ORNAMENTS on an index card and slid it in. For twenty years my boxes were identical brown rectangles and every November I opened the wrong one first. Now I reach for the one box with the card and I am done looking. The ZOBER label slot is the plainest feature on the thing and the one I use every single year without thinking about it.
One trip up the stairs instead of three
Before this, my ornaments lived in two cardboard boxes and a bag of loose ones that never went back the way it came. Gary carried all three up the stairs and the bag always tipped somewhere around the fourth step. Now there is one box with a zipper around the top. He carries it up, sets it on the dining table, and goes back to his coffee. One trip. That is the whole improvement and it is enough.
It holds the whole collection in one place
I have about fifty ornaments, collected slowly over twenty-four years, a piece or two most years and nothing in the lean ones. Fifty fits in fifty-four slots with a few left over. Having them together means I can see the whole collection at once and decide what actually goes on the tree this year, instead of hanging everything because it happened to be in my hand. The tree looks better when I am choosing rather than unloading.
The zipper keeps the basement out of them
This is a fabric box with a zipper, not a sealed hard bin, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What it does is keep the dust and the grit off, which is more than a taped cardboard box ever did. The first November I opened it, the ornaments came out clean and the glitter stayed in the box where it belonged instead of all over my hands and the dining table.
It stacks with everything else on the shelf
The box is built to stack, so it goes on the shelf with the tree box and the garland and does not need a shelf of its own. The whole off-season collection lives on two shelves in the basement now. Nothing is tied with twine, nothing is balanced on top of something else, and nothing falls over when Gary pulls the tree box out in November. That used to happen every year.
Packing away in January takes an evening, not a Saturday
Taking Christmas down is the part nobody enjoys. With the cardboard boxes I used to sort, wrap and re-wrap, and still end up with a bag of things that did not fit anywhere. Now each ornament goes into a slot, the top zips shut, and the card goes in the slot. It is the difference between a job and a chore. I finished the ornaments before Gary had the tree halfway apart.
It stops me buying a second set of something I already own
One box with a label on it means I know what I have. Two Decembers ago I bought a dozen glass balls I did not need because I could not remember what was in the brown boxes and did not feel like digging to find out. Now I check the ZOBER box first. That habit has kept the collection from turning into more clutter for me to store, which is the whole point of getting organized in the first place.
What I'd Skip
Two things I would not do. First, I would not put this box on a basement floor. The ZOBER box is fabric, it is not waterproof, and it is not a hard bin, so anything damp that gets to the outside will eventually get to your ornaments. Mine sits on a shelf and has stayed dry, and I would keep it that way. Second, I would not buy it expecting to fit large or odd-shaped pieces. The listing names 54 three-inch ornaments. My round ones are about three inches and they fit. I am not going to tell you what a five-inch Santa will do, because I have not tried it and I would be guessing. If your collection is mostly big pieces, this is the wrong box for you. If it is mostly round glass and a few small keepsakes, it is the right one.
Fifty ornaments went down to the basement in January and came back up in November exactly the way I put them in. That is the whole review.
If your ornaments still live in a cardboard box, this is the year to stop
The ZOBER box holds 54 three-inch ornaments in divided slots, measures 24 by 12 by 12 inches, and has a card slot for a label. One box, one trip up the stairs, one less cracked ornament in January.
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