Safely Store Ornaments with Items You Already Have

Empty egg cartons, drink carriers, plastic clamshell boxes from the bakery and other disposable grocery containers are excellent for storing holiday ornaments. They can be stacked neatly inside a larger bin and will keep your ornaments safe while in storage. Next, check out our 10 favorite Christmas tree species.

Winding the lights around your Christmas tree can be a pain. Here's a great way to rotate the tree in its stand?without scratching up your hardwood floor. Put a bath rug underneath the tree stand, fabric side down, rubber side up. You can easily turn the tree to string your lights and place your ornaments just where you want them. It makes 'undecorating' the tree a breeze too. Fold the rug under the tree skirt to keep it hidden. Do you think real Christmas trees harbor bugs? Find out here.

Family Handyman tested using several different hand tools to crack open a variety of nuts. The good news is that all of the tools we used worked, but a couple got the job done a bit better. Click here to find out what we learned.

Instead of poking nails into aluminum soffits and fascia when you're hanging holiday lights, clip the wires to the bottom lip of the fascia with clothespins. But be careful up on the ladder. Click here to learn more about ladder safety.

The wire hooks that come with Christmas tree ornaments can be hard to use and can scratch the ornaments. Instead of wire hangers, use plastic-coated paper clips to hang your ornaments. The paper clips are stronger and easy to use, and best of all, they won't scratch the ornaments, so you can leave them attached when you pack the ornaments away at the end of each season. Don't want to deal with a traditional Christmas tree this year? Check out these ingenious alternatives.

This hint will save you from wasting wrapping paper each time you bring it out of storage. Rather than sticking a piece of tape along the loose edge, cut an empty toilet paper tube lengthwise and wrap it around a roll of wrapping paper. Cinch it up and secure the sleeve with a piece of tape. Next time you use the wrapping, you may rip the sleeve when removing it, but your wrapping paper will remain intact.

Tightening tree stand nuts by hand is tiring and takes forever. Here's an alternative: Cut off the little Ls at the end of the tree stand bolts with a hacksaw. ( Be sure the hacksaw blade is installed correctly.) Chuck the ends of the bolts into a variable-speed drill to tighten them into the trunk. You'll be out from under that prickly tree in no time. P.S. It's a fact of Christmas: The tree stand gets overfilled and water stains the carpet or the hardwood floor. To prevent this, a reader suggests placing a plastic water heater tank catch basin between the stand and the floor. Or, you can use a snow saucer.

Most homes have only two exterior outlets—one in the front and one in the back. That may be OK most of the year, but it’s a real hassle when you’re hanging holiday lights. It can be dangerous, too. Overloading cords or outlets poses a fire hazard, while crisscrossing your driveway and sidewalk with cords creates tripping hazards. In just a few hours, you can solve these problems forever by adding an outlet or two. Do it safely and easily with this simple through-the-wall technique.

You’ve tried the attic, a closet in the master bedroom and even a creepy corner of the basement, but your kids have yet to be stumped on where to find their hidden holiday gifts. Instead of those classic spots, click here for some unexpected hiding places to try for this year's holiday gifts.

Next up: How to store Christmas lights. Here's a great way to recycle cardboard and keep your strings of holiday lights from getting tangled when you store them. Just use strips of cardboard and cut out a slot on each end to make a 'spool' to keep the lights from slipping off.

Use dowels inside a storage bin for organizing your holiday ornaments when the season is over. Measure the length of your bin from one lip to the other; then cut a wooden dowel into two or three pieces of that length. Hang the ornaments on the dowels and hang the dowels on the lip inside the bin.

There’s a way to test (and fix) the entire string of holiday lights without testing each bulb individually. Try the LightKeeper Pro (www.lightkeeperpro.com). It’ll identify and oftentimes fix most problems in miniature and icicle light sets (but not the sets of larger lights or LED lights) with a few squeezes of the trigger.

Save yourself the stressful task of untangling a messy string of holiday lights by wrapping them around a hanger before putting them in storage. Try to keep the string of lights neat as you wrap it around the hanger, starting on one end and working your way across to the other end, with as little overlap as possible. If your string of lights is quite long, you can continue wrapping a second layer neatly over the first, again with as little overlap as possible. This will help to keep the cord organized and free of tangles when you unwind it for the next holiday season. Take the hassle out of storing your holiday lights and decorations with these simple, inexpensive tips.

Using a 6-ft. cardboard cement form cut in half, I created two wrapping paper storage containers. I cut the cylinder in half and cut pieces of heavy cardboard for the base of each, attaching them with duct tape. Then I spray painted them to look presentable. — Peter Turner Check out what another Christmas-related item you can stuff in a concrete form tube.

It's hard to store fragile ornaments without breaking them. Our best tip for how to store Christmas ornaments is this easy solution: Use a plastic storage tub and store each ornament in a separate plastic cup (the 6-oz. party size works great). By using cardboard to separate the layers of cups, you can stack a lot of ornaments in one sturdy tub without any tangling or breaking. You can reuse the same cups and cardboard year after year.

Now that the holiday is over, what's the best way to store an artificial Christmas tree? Many people like the convenience of an artificial Christmas tree, but storing it can be a pain because it takes up so much space. Here's an idea: Buy two 8-in.-diameter concrete form tubes, wrap each layer of the tree in twine and shove half of the tree layers down each tube. Mark the layer numbers on each tube and slide the tubes up in your garage rafters for a perfect storage solution! Need more more storage space for your tree and other Christmas decorations? Check out these great garage cabinets.

Keep your snowthrower at peak performance by spraying Rain-X inside the chute as part of your tune-up routine. That’s what reader John Gossard does! The Rain-X helps to prevent snow and ice from clogging up the chute, so you can move more snow faster.

Make shoveling snow easier by first coating your metal shovel with car wax. Follow the application instructions on the car wax package. Then the snow and ice will slide right off of the shovel after each scoop.