Woman shares 5 second hack to stop Christmas lights from tangling up in storage

A woman has taken to Reddit to share the Christmas light hack she came across when shopping in a charity shop, which she has been using ever since – and will never look back from

Now Christmas has come and gone for another year, there’s nothing left to do but pack away the decorations. Most people take time to wrap up their favourite baubles to make sure they’re safe in storage – but this level of care usually goes out the window when it comes to the Christmas lights.

To help avoid a “tangled mess” next year, a woman has shared the five-second hack that forever changed the way she stores her Christmas lights. Speaking to Reddit, she said: “Tangle free way to store Christmas lights. I saw it at goodwill and wanted to share because it’s simple and I never would have thought of this.”

The woman shared an image of a string of Christmas lights wrapped around a sheet of cardboard. The cardboard has two to three inch slits cut into it to keep the lights from falling out of place.

After seeing the image, one user revealed how their neighbour throws their lights out every year just so they don’t have to deal with the nuisance of untangling them.

One user said: “My neighbours just throw them out every year. I wonder how much one-time-used holiday décor is in landfills.”

Sharing their own storage technique, another user added: “I roll them up like a ball of yarn. It makes it super easy to store and you literally grab the end and just roll it out. I’ve been doing it for 30+ years and never once had a tangle or an issue.”

Seconding this, one more user said: “Ball method! The ball method is best for storage and application.”

It comes after a woman revealed how she puts up her tree perfectly in just five minutes every year.

Gillian Cowie said that she used to spend around two hours decorating and tweaking her Christmas tree each year with tinsel, lights and baubles until it was ‘just right’ – but now she has a trick to save time.

She carefully wraps the 6ft tree up in cling film, and she showed it in a TikTok video, before storing it away for the next year.

Gillian, of Hamilton, Lanarkshire, Scotland, said: “It’s to save time because I’m quite a perfectionist with all the baubles, lights and tinsel – so it takes me a long time to get everything just right.

“I absolutely wouldn’t go back to my old way of doing it, it’s so much easier. Some people might be able to swing up a Christmas tree in half an hour I don’t know.”

She said that as long as it’s wrapped quite tightly and some of the branches are bent in, it stays safe and secure until the following year.

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