The best Christmas light storage bags and bins

600D fabric with a PVC lining, reinforced handles and three reels inside. Reels plus a bag is the combination that works; either alone does not.

The hour you spend in January decides the hour you spend in November. Lights thrown into a cardboard box come out as one object eleven months later, and untangling it is the worst job in the whole project.

The fix is reels inside a bag. Reels keep each run wound and separate; the bag keeps the reels together, keeps dust and rodents off, and survives being stacked on. HOLDN' STORAGE sells the combination: three reels inside a 600D bag with a PVC lining and reinforced handles.

Capacity is about 375 feet of string or cord, which is one average house. If you run a full roofline plus bushes plus a path, buy two and split them logically — roofline in one, ground-level in the other — so next November you carry up only what you need first.

One habit worth building: label each reel with where its run goes as you wind it. 'Front gutter, 4 sets' written on a piece of tape in January is worth twenty minutes next season.

Waterproof Oxford fabric with buckle closures, sized for four standard C7/C9 reels. The waterproofing is the point if storage is a garage rather than a closet.

Where the lights live matters more than what they live in. An attic is dry and temperature-extreme. A garage is temperature-extreme and damp, and a shed is worse. For the damp cases, waterproof fabric is a real specification rather than a marketing word.

Fixwal's bags are waterproof Oxford with buckle closures — buckles being a sensible choice over a zip, since zips in a garage acquire grit and stop closing after two seasons.

There is a catch worth stating. A waterproof bag keeps water out and also keeps it in. Lights taken off a roof in a January drizzle are wet. Put them away wet in a sealed waterproof bag and you get corrosion at the sockets over eleven months. Let them dry indoors for a day first — this is the single most valuable takedown habit on this site.

Reels are sold separately, so budget for those too.

A rigid gasketed bin. Bad for light strings, excellent for everything else in the display — the hardware, which is what actually goes missing between seasons.

Everyone plans storage for the lights and nobody plans it for the hardware. Then in November the clips are in three places, the timer is somewhere, and the spare bulbs are gone. Replacing all of that costs more than the bin does.

A rigid gasketed box is the right home for clips, stakes, timers, smart plugs, spare bulbs and fuses. Rigid walls stop a timer being crushed under a box of ornaments, and the gasket keeps damp off the metal contacts, which is what kills a stored timer.

It is the wrong container for light strings. A bin is a volume, and a volume full of loose string is a tangle by definition. Strings go on reels, hardware goes in the bin.

One good habit: keep the fuse spares taped inside the lid. Christmas light fuses are tiny, they are the first thing to go, and they are impossible to find in a drawer in December.

Same format, but the reels are metal rather than plastic. Plastic reels crack at the hub in a cold attic; metal ones do not.

Plastic reels fail in one specific way: the hub cracks. It happens in an unheated attic or garage where the plastic gets cold and brittle, and it happens under the tension of a tightly wound run.

Metal reels do not do that. ZOBER's bag ships with three, plus stitched handles rather than glued ones — handles tearing off a loaded bag on attic stairs is the other standard failure in this category.

The bag fabric is lighter than the heavy 600D option, so if the bag is going to live under a stack of boxes, the heavier bag is the better buy. If it lives on a shelf, this is fine and the metal reels are the better half of the package.

Worth knowing: the reels outlive everything. People replace the bag every few years and keep the same reels for a decade.