Easy Christmas Light Storage

We decorated the office this year.  No, wait, that's a huge understatement.  We totally transformed the office this year.  My section was "Santa's Village"...complete with 3-D snowscape, a crushed velvet Santa chair, bakery, a fireplace that soared to the ceiling...not one, but TWO rooftops...and a live Santa and elf running around.  Someone called it "overboard."  I prefer to characterize it as "fully committed."  Either way....

As I was starting to tidy up today, I made up a nifty trick for re-purposing some holiday scraps and storing Christmas lights that I thought I'd pass along.  It looks like this:

I took a scrap piece of cardboard and notched one end of it to feed the cord through...wrapped the lights...cut another notch and pushed the other end of the cord through.  I figured it would be smart to mark where to start the unrolling...so I labeled it.  Annnnd done.  

I hate unraveling the annual tangle of Christmas lights...and those silly light-holder things hurt my fingers and are way too cumbersome (every...bulb....gets....pushed....in.....blaaargh!).  This was easy and super fast...and will keep the light strand straight.  If you size your cardboard just right, you can put the whole she-bang into one of those leftover yellow padded envelopes that you got from Amazon when you ordered one of the eleventy-squillion video games your kid wanted for Christmas....

....oh.  Maybe that's just me?  Well, if you need some, let me know.  I have a bunch....  

So there you go:  de-stress your un-decorating and reuse holiday scraps in the process.  Merry Christmas!