ZOBER Ornament Box vs Cardboard and Bins

Every January I do the same thing. I sit on the basement floor with a cardboard box between my knees and a roll of newspaper going soft in my hand, and I say the same sentence to my husband Gary: this is the year I find a better way to put these away. Last January I finally did. I bought one ZOBER ornament storage box, carried it down the stairs, and packed about fifty ornaments into it. That is one pack-away and one unpacking, not a decade of proof, so take this as a fair accounting from someone who has only done it once and who still has the old boxes in the corner to compare it against.

Here is the short answer if you are standing in the basement right now trying to decide. Cardboard boxes are free and they work until they don't. Plastic bins shrug off damp and swallow any shape you own. The ZOBER box does the one job neither of those does, which is keep fifty round ornaments from touching each other for eleven months of the year. I still use all three. The ZOBER box holds the round glass, one deep bin holds the odd pieces and the tree topper, and the old cardboard is finally out at the curb. That split is the honest answer, and the rest of this is why.

I am 62 and I have been decorating this house for the holidays for 24 years, and I have never once bought a matching set of anything. My ornaments are a mixture of things my kids made, things my mother had, and a few I bought myself at an after Christmas sale. That is the collection this comparison is about. If yours looks different, some of it will not apply to you, and I will try to say where.

	ZOBER Ornament Box	Cardboard boxes and plastic bins
What you spend to start	One box, bought once, that you keep and reuse.	Nothing at all, if you already have them in the basement.
Water on the shelf	Oxford fabric and not water resistant, so a damp spring is a real risk.	Plastic sheds water and does not care what the floor does.
Something heavy stacked on top	The sides hold their shape but give under real weight.	A rigid tote takes the load and protects what is inside.
Odd shapes and oversized pieces	Built for round ornaments around three inches, so the wide angel has nowhere to go.	A deep bin takes whatever you drop into it.
Keeping ornaments apart	54 separate compartments, one ornament in each.	Newspaper and nesting, glass resting against glass.
Finding one specific ornament	Dual zipper opens the top flat and a card slot holds a label.	Tape, unmarked flaps, and digging.
Same footprint every year	One 24 by 12 by 12 cubical box that stacks with itself.	Whatever sizes you happened to collect over the years.
January pack-away time	Set each ornament in a slot and zip. About twenty minutes for fifty.	Cut, wrap and twist, fifty times over.

Where ZOBER Wins

The first thing I noticed was how fast January went. With the cardboard, every ornament got a square of newspaper and a twist, fifty times over, with the radio on, and it took most of an evening. With the ZOBER box I unzipped the lid, and the dividers give it 54 slots, and I set each ornament down in its own compartment and moved to the next. All fifty took about twenty minutes. The dual zipper means the lid folds back flat and stays out of the way while you load it, and there is a card slot on the front for a label. I wrote ORNAMENTS on an index card and slid it in. That sounds like nothing until you remember the year you opened four boxes looking for the one with the good baubles in it.

I timed it out of curiosity, because I did not believe it either. I started at ten to eight on a Sunday evening, after the dishes were done and with the ballgame on the kitchen radio, and I had the zipper closed before the weather came on. The January before, with the same fifty ornaments and the same roll of newspaper, I was still sitting on that floor with a lap full of newsprint when Gary turned off the basement light and went up to bed. Same ornaments, same woman, same evening. The only thing that changed was whether I had to wrap them.

The second thing, and the reason I would buy it again, is that nothing cracked. Not one piece. In the cardboard years I would open a box in December and find one or two in pieces, usually something with a thin neck, and I would stand there holding both halves of an ornament one of my kids made in second grade. That stopped. The dividers hold each piece upright in its own slot, the inside is lined so things do not slide, and the box is 24 inches long by 12 wide by 12 high, which is a footprint that sits on a basement shelf without hanging over the edge. It has stayed where I put it. Gary stacks the bin of odd pieces on top of it and it holds.

I want to be fair about what this box actually is, because the listing is honest and so am I. It is 600D oxford fabric with a zipper, it is not a hard plastic bin, and the company says right on the page that it is not water resistant. It is a soft-sided box with some structure to it. That matters for where you put it and it matters for what you stack on it, and I would rather you hear it from me now than find out on a wet morning in April.

There is also the matter of how it looks on a shelf, which should not matter and does. A cardboard box with a shipping label on the side and a black plastic tote do not say Christmas. This one is made for the job, with a card slot on the front and a zipper instead of tape, and it looks like it belongs with the decorations rather than with a move. It is a small thing and I notice it every January.

Where Cardboard and Bins Win

The first place the ZOBER box loses is water, and it loses badly. Fabric does not shed a damp spring. Plastic does. We have never had water on that shelf, and I am not going to invent a flood to make a point, but I have stood in that basement in April and felt the air, and I would not put fifty sentimental ornaments in a fabric box on a concrete floor in a house with an unfinished basement. Mine is on a shelf, up off the floor, and it will stay there. If your only storage is a garage corner or a floor-level spot that gets damp, a lidded plastic tote is the right answer and no review should tell you otherwise.

I know exactly why I feel that way, so let me tell you. Two springs ago we had a stretch of wet weather and I went down to check on the shelves. The concrete by the bottom step was cold and beaded up with moisture, and a cardboard box I had set down there a month earlier had gone soft and dark at the bottom corner. Nothing inside it was ruined, and I moved it that same afternoon. But I have not forgotten the feel of that box, and it is the reason the fabric box lives on a shelf and never on the floor, no matter how tired I am in January.

The second place it loses is anything that is not roughly round and roughly three inches. The listing says 54 ornaments, and mine are about three inches across and they fit in the slots, so that is all I can tell you from my own use. What I can tell you is that the angel with the wide skirt and the long glass icicle do not go in a slot, and never will, and they went into the bin with the bubble wrap the same as always. The angel came from my mother and her skirt is close to seven inches across, wider than a compartment and taller than the lid will close on. A deep tote takes whatever you drop into it. If your tree is mostly large pieces and family pieces in odd shapes, the bin is simply the better tool for that job.

And cardboard wins on being free. I am not going to pretend otherwise. If you have four ornaments and a small tree, a shoebox and a sheet of tissue paper will do everything this box does, and I would feel silly telling you to spend money on 54 slots. Cardboard can also be cut down, written on, or thrown out without a second thought. The reason I stopped using it is not that it is free. It is that the free box took one or two ornaments from me every single January, and after enough Januaries that stopped feeling free.

The Split I Use Now

A few years back I started keeping a written list of what goes where and taping it inside the lid of the plastic bin, and that habit carried over. Now the round glass ornaments live in the ZOBER box, the odd shapes and the topper live in the deep bin, and the cardboard is gone. Unpacking takes about ten minutes instead of an hour of sorting. I bring the box up the weekend after Thanksgiving when Gary brings the tree up, open it on the dining room table, and set the ornaments out by size before any of them go on a branch. Sorting first is the part that makes the tree look like something instead of a pile, and the box is what makes the sorting quick.

Last December I did it on a Saturday, because our daughter was driving in that evening and I wanted the tree finished before she walked in the door. I unzipped the box at the dining table at two in the afternoon with the parade on the television in the next room, laid the ornaments out in rows from small to large, and had the tree done, lights on and all, before four. The year I was still pulling newspaper out of cardboard, that same job ran into the evening and the tree was half decorated when she arrived. She noticed the difference without being told, which is the only review that counts.

What I would change, if anyone asked me, is the size of the slots. My round ornaments are about three inches and they fit, but I have two wider pieces that had to go in the bin, and a box that took both would mean one less container on that shelf. That is a small complaint from one household with one collection, and it is not a reason to skip the box if your ornaments are the usual round kind, which most of mine are and most of anybody's are.

Who Should Buy Which

Buy the ZOBER box if your ornaments are mostly round, mostly in the three inch range, and the kind that cracks. That is most collections, including mine. Buy it if January is the part of the season you dread, or if you have ever opened a box in December and found two halves of something you cannot replace. Buy it if your storage is a shelf in a dry closet or a dry basement and you want the same footprint every year, because it is a 24 by 12 by 12 cubical box that stacks with itself and takes a label on the front.

Stay with bins, or add one alongside it, if your ornaments run large or odd, if you have pieces you would hand down, or if your storage is a garage, a shed, or a basement corner that gets damp. Fabric is the wrong material for a wet floor and the company says so itself. And if your whole collection fits in a shoebox, use the shoebox. Buying 54 slots to hold eight ornaments is not organizing, it is just a bigger thing to carry up the stairs.

The way I would put it to a neighbor over the fence is this. The ZOBER box is not a better cardboard box. It is a different job. Cardboard and bins are for holding things. This is for keeping fifty small round things from touching each other for eleven months, and once you have had a January where nothing cracked, it is hard to go back to newspaper.