OrnamentTracker

Eleven months in the box: storage

An ornament spends over 90% of its life in storage. The materials touching it during those eleven months matter more than anything you do in December.

Care & Keeping · Guide 2

The materials museums use

Museum storage practice for fragile objects is built on a short list of inert materials, and all of them are available to home collectors:

Unbuffered acid-free tissue

The National Park Service's storage guidance calls for unbuffered acid-free tissue when padding is needed for objects.[1] The buffered/unbuffered distinction matters: buffered papers carry an alkaline reserve that suits some materials and harms others, which is why NPS publishes a dedicated guide on choosing between them.[2] For mixed-material ornaments (glass with fabric, paper, or painted decoration), unbuffered is the safe default.[1]

Polyethylene foam supports

NPS curatorial guidance for glass describes cutting rigid polyethylene foam into fitted wells to support individual glass objects, lining the cut foam with Tyvek or smooth foam sheet so the surface can't abrade.[3] A home-scale version of the same idea: a compartmented ornament case with soft, non-scratching dividers, one ornament per cell.

Acid-free boxes

Archival corrugated board, acid-free and available in buffered and unbuffered varieties, is the standard museum box material.[2] The Conservation Center for Art & Historic Artifacts publishes a plain-language guide to selecting storage materials if you want to go deeper.[4]

How to pack, step by step

These steps apply museum handling rules[5] to the December tear-down:

1. Work at a clear, padded surface. One ornament at a time, supported from underneath, never carried by the cap.[5]
2. Dust before packing (see the cleaning guide) so grit doesn't sit against the surface all year.
3. Wrap in unbuffered acid-free tissue: snug, not tight. The tissue is padding, not compression.[1]
4. One ornament per compartment. Ornaments should never touch each other or stack; museum guidance prohibits stacking glass and ceramic objects outright.[5]
5. Heaviest pieces in the bottom-most layer of the case, and the case stored where it won't be crushed or knocked.

Keepsake collectors: many collectors keep Hallmark and Radko original boxes. In the resale market, an ornament "with box" routinely lists higher than one without. That's a collecting judgment, not a conservation rule: if you keep original boxes, the archival case-and-tissue approach above still protects the ornament itself best.

Where the box lives

The Canadian Conservation Institute's preventive guidance for ceramics and glass calls for clean, environmentally controlled conditions, with storage organized so pieces are handled as little as possible.[6] In a house, that argues for a closet on a living floor over spaces with big temperature and humidity swings, and for a storage spot you can reach without moving other boxes off the top.

Sources

  1. National Park Service, Museum Handbook, Appendix I (padding: unbuffered tissue).
  2. National Park Service, Conserve O Gram 4/9: "Buffered and Unbuffered Storage Materials".
  3. National Park Service, Museum Handbook, Appendix P: "Curatorial Care of Ceramic, Glass, and Stone Objects".
  4. Conservation Center for Art & Historic Artifacts, "Selecting Materials for Storage and Display".
  5. National Park Service, Conserve O Gram 8/1 (handling rules: support from underneath, one at a time, never stack).
  6. Canadian Conservation Institute, "Caring for ceramic and glass objects: preventive conservation guidelines".