Best Christmas Storage for Small Apartments

Christmas is the largest single storage event of the year in a small apartment. A tree that was nine feet tall in December has to become an object you can live with in February, and a box of glass has to survive eleven months somewhere it will not get stood on.

The category that solves this is cheap, enormous, and sold on two numbers that do not mean what they appear to mean. "Fits a 9 ft tree" is a height claim, not a volume. "Stores 128 ornaments" is a claim about compartment size, not capacity. Read both the way the makers actually publish them and the choice gets simple.

A tree height is not a volume

Every tree bag in this category is sold by the height of tree it takes. That number tells you almost nothing on its own, because a disassembled tree is not its height -- it is three or four sections of hinged branches whose packed bulk depends on how dense the tree is, and nobody publishes that.

What the makers do publish, when they publish anything, is the size of the bag. For the same stated 9 ft tree: BALEINE's flat bag is 60 x 20 x 30 in and BALEINE's own rolling bag is 65 x 16 x 30 in -- five inches longer and four narrower, for an identical claim. The 12 ft container from Santa's Bags is 22 x 22 x 72 in and gets there by standing the tree up instead of laying it down.

TreeKeeper is the one maker that publishes the condition attached to its claim. Its large upright container is stated to fit most trees up to 9 ft and over 6 ft wide -- and then adds that trees over 7 1/2 ft will need the top section removed and stored at the base of the bag. That is the honest version of what every "9 ft" claim in this category means: it fits, in the sense that all the pieces end up inside.

So the order of operations is: pack the tree down the way you actually pack it, measure that pile, and compare it against a published bag dimension. A bag that publishes no dimensions at all is asking you to trust a height.

An ornament count is a compartment size in disguise

"Stores up to 128 ornaments" sounds like twice the box that "64" is. It is not. It is a bigger box cut the same way, and the published figures show it plainly.

Simple Houseware publishes default compartments of 3 x 3 x 3 in and a box of 25.5 x 13 x 13 in -- about 4,300 cubic inches for 128 ornaments. Hearth & Harbor publishes 64 ornaments in a 13 x 13 x 12 in box, which is about 2,030 cubic inches. Divide either one through and you get roughly the same 32 to 34 cubic inches per ornament, because both are built around the same standard bauble.

Which means the count is not a quality. It is a size. The number that actually decides whether a box works for you is the compartment, and only two of the three publish it: Simple Houseware states 3 x 3 x 3 in with room for the hook, and the budget QIHANS box states compartments fitting balls up to 3 x 3 in. Hearth & Harbor publishes no compartment dimension at all and describes its dividers as adjustable for any size, which is a sentence rather than a figure.

Where it goes is the constraint, not what it costs

All of this is cheap. None of it is small. In a one-bedroom apartment the binding constraint is the place the thing lives for eleven months, and the four options are not interchangeable.

Under the bed: not for the tree

Worth saying plainly, because it is the first place people look. The tree bags here are 16 to 20 inches deep. The containers on our under-bed storage page publish heights of 5 to 7 inches, which is what a bed frame actually clears. A packed tree bag does not go under a bed, and no amount of squashing changes that. Ornament boxes at 12 to 13 inches tall do not either.

The closet floor, standing up

This is what the upright containers are for. The Santa's Bags frame turns six feet of tree into a 22 inch square of floor, which is the single most efficient thing in this category for a small apartment -- and the reason it costs several times what a bag costs.

The top shelf, folded

The argument for the fabric bags and the folding ornament boxes is what they do in January. The BALEINE bags and both folding ornament boxes are stated to fold flat when empty, so they take a few inches of shelf rather than remaining a box-shaped object all year. A rigid tub does not do this, and in a small apartment that is a real cost.

What these listings get wrong about themselves

Three contradictions turned up while collecting the figures above, and all three are the kind that cost a buyer money.

BALEINE publishes two fabric weights for one bag. The title of the flat 9 ft bag says 900D Oxford; the listing text says 600D Oxford canvas. Fabric weight is most of what you are paying for in a tree bag, and the listing cannot decide.

The dimensions field is frequently not the product. TreeKeeper's large upright container -- a thing that swallows a 9 ft tree -- has a dimensions field reading 28 x 16 x 7 in at 0.55 lb, which is the folded carton. The QIHANS ornament box publishes 1 x 1 x 1 in. Where a listing's copy and its dimensions field disagree, the copy is usually the product and the field is usually the packaging.

Nobody publishes a weight limit. Not one container here states what it will carry, which matters most for the rolling bags: a packed 9 ft tree is heavy, and the handles and the zips are what fail. The closest thing to a published answer is construction -- wrap-around rather than stitched handles, a steel frame, 600D fabric -- which is why those appear in the picks above.

What we would skip

Any tree bag that publishes only a height. On a page where two bags for the same 9 ft tree differ by five inches in length and four in width, a height on its own is marketing.

Buying the biggest ornament count you can find. The count scales with the box, not with the value. Work out how many ornaments you own, add the ones you will buy this year, and buy that box -- the extra 64 compartments are 12 more inches of closet.

A rigid tub, in a small apartment. Hard boxes protect better and we would use one in a garage. In a one-bedroom where the empty container has to live somewhere too, a box that folds into itself wins on the eleven months it is not in use.

Storing a tree bag where it gets stood on. No maker publishes a crush rating, so the top of a closet with nothing above it is the right answer, and under the pile is not.

The rest of the seasonal problem

Christmas storage comes in three pieces and this page covers two of them. The third is the paper, which is decided by a different measurement entirely: wrapping paper storage ranks that category by the published roll-length ceiling, which runs from 30 to 48 inches and is the reason most gift wrap organizers are longer than the paper people actually buy.

For the rest of the year, the same closet problem is handled by vacuum storage bags for out-of-season clothing and apartment closet organization for the closet as a whole.