The Basement Shelf That Finally Made Sense

The first weekend in January is when Christmas comes down in this house. Not because I am ready for it. Because that is the weekend Gary and I have the time, and once the tree is out the door the rest of it follows. For years that weekend ended the same way, me on the basement stairs with three cardboard boxes gone soft at the corners, wrapping glass ornaments in newspaper I had already read.

I knew it was a bad system. I kept it anyway. Every January an ornament or two came out of the wrapping in pieces. One year it was a Santa with a chipped boot. Another year it was a round ball my daughter painted in second grade, cracked clean across the middle.

That is the part nobody says out loud about ornaments. After twenty some years they stop being decorations. They are a record of who gave you what. So last January, with the tree down and the boxes open on the basement floor, I bought one ZOBER ornament storage box. One box, not a whole new system.

The ZOBER box measures 24 by 12 by 12 inches, which is the size of the shelf space Gary had already cleared. Inside, dividers make 54 slots, and each slot holds a round ornament about three inches across, which is most of what I own. There is a small card slot on the outside for a label so I stop guessing which box is which. The lid closes with a dual zipper. It is 600D oxford fabric, not a hard plastic tote, and I want to be plain about that up front.

The test was the pack-away itself. I sat at the kitchen table on a Sunday afternoon with the ornaments sorted into keep and mend and the box open beside me. Fifty ornaments went in, one to a slot, no newspaper, no tape, no nesting one inside another. It took about twenty minutes, which is less time than I used to spend hunting for the end of the tape roll.

Fifty ornaments in, one to a slot, nothing wrapped in newspaper, and room to spare. That was the whole test.

Then it sat on the basement shelf until this past November, when Christmas went up the weekend after Thanksgiving. Gary carried it up for me, which he could not do with three sagging cardboard boxes at once. The label card said what was inside, so there was no opening four boxes to find the one I wanted. I lifted the lid and every ornament was where I had put it. Nothing cracked. That has not happened in this house in a long time.

There is a small thing I did not expect to care about. The card slot. I wrote Ornaments on a scrap of paper and slid it in, and now I know which box is which without opening anything. When you have four boxes on a shelf and only one of them holds the things that matter, that is worth something.

Here is what it is not. It is fabric, not a hard bin, so it will not protect anything from a wet basement floor, and I would not stack a heavy tote on top of it. Mine sits on a shelf, never on the floor, and that is where it will stay. It is not water resistant either. And my ornaments are the round three inch kind, so I can tell you how those fit and nothing more. If you have bigger pieces or odd shapes, that is a different question and I am not the one to answer it.

Compared to what I was doing, the difference is not really about the box. It is about twenty minutes in January and twenty minutes in November, against the afternoon I used to lose to newspaper and tape and finding the scissors. I buy one or two decorations a year and I do not redo a room, so I am not the person to sell you a whole shelving system. One box replaced three cardboard ones and I have not missed them.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

I would tell you to count your ornaments before you buy anything. Not guess. Count them, and measure the widest one. I had about fifty and I knew the round ones were near three inches, which is how I landed on a 54 slot box instead of something enormous. I would also tell you to measure the shelf, because a box that does not fit the shelf ends up on the floor, and a fabric box on a basement floor is a bad idea.

And I would tell you not to buy it in December. Buy it in January, when the tree is down and the mess is right in front of you and you are actually annoyed enough to change something. That is when I bought mine, and it is the only reason I followed through. The ZOBER box was not a project. It was one thing I did on a Sunday afternoon so the next eleven months would be easier, and they were.