The best Christmas light storage reels

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.

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.

A reel designed to be carried along the roofline and wound as you remove the lights, rather than one you coil onto afterwards on the garage floor.

There are two ways to get lights onto a reel. You can pull everything off the house into a pile and then wind the pile, or you can wind as you remove. The second is faster, produces a better wind, and is the whole idea behind an install-and-store reel.

Carrying a handled reel along the run and winding as the clips come off means the string is never on the ground and never in a pile. A run wound under light, even tension pays back out cleanly next November — which is the actual test of a storage system.

You still need something to put the reels in. Reels alone on an attic shelf collect dust and get knocked loose; the bag-plus-reels options above solve that, and these reels drop into them fine.

Count reels against runs, not against total footage. One reel is one continuous run, and a typical house has four to six of them.

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.