How sneaky were you as a child? Did you discover you could slip the tray out from your advent calendar and eat all the chocolate without opening the doors? Did your parents have to find evermore inventive places to hide your gifts, only for you to discover them a week before Christmas anyway? 

Well, it’s worth remembering the tactics and determination you employed as a child when considering how best to store the presents and treats you buy for Christmas now that you’re an adult. Here are some of our top tips for storing your Christmas shopping and keeping everything safe, undiscovered and uneaten until the big day!
 

1. These are places where you shouldn’t hide gifts and food.

Most adults with families have a ‘Christmas cupboard’ for food specifically for Christmas. The cupboard is full of things like crisps, crackers, chocolates, nuts and dried fruit, packets of stuffing and jars of pickle or condiments. Unless your cupboard is fitted with a sturdy lock, then your Christmas cupboard will be raided at some point - especially if you have teenagers in the house. If you can’t accept that, you’ll need to find an alternative place to hide everything for a peaceful Christmas!

In terms of hiding presents, unless you live in a mansion with an empty wing, you probably don’t have acres of space to hide gifts after you’ve done your Christmas shopping. Under the bed or at the top/bottom of your wardrobe are standard go-to Christmas present hiding spaces in most homes. These are exactly where your offspring will likely look the first chance they get unless you have raised perfect angels, of course! 

Gifts are also likely to get damaged if they’re squashed into small spaces, and at this time of year, you’re never too far from mice, ladybirds and those enormous spiders that make their way into our homes to find warmth - you certainly don’t want any of those making a nest in your cashmere scarf gift set! 

So, don’t go for the obvious hiding places in your home, and don’t go for these places either:

• Car boot - if your car gets stolen, your insurance probably won’t cover replacing them.
• Dryer - true, your children are unlikely to look here, but you’ll forget you put the boxes of chocolates in there and melt them when you next dry your towels.
• Again, the laundry hamper is a decent hiding place, but you’ll forget and end up scooping gifts into the washing machine and your dirty laundry.
• In the shed, sheds are more likely to be broken into than houses, and the contents of sheds are more prone to damage from dampness, frost, and pests.
• Behind the bath panel - a burst pipe in the cold weather could dampen your plans for a lovely Christmas!

2. Team up with your neighbour 

The parents next door will be having the same problems as you when storing / hiding presents. You could agree to store presents for each other - in which case, keeping them under the bed, in the spare room, or slap bang in the middle of the dining room table will be fine because your family will know they’re not for them!

This probably won’t work for storing Christmas food because, to a hungry teenager or a tipsy partner returning from a Christmas work do, no food is off-limits. 

Also, remember that if something happened to your neighbour’s house (fire, flood or burglary), their contents insurance might not be as good as yours. They might not have any contents insurance or be limited in the value of what they can claim for. If they have pets, you’d have to trust that those pets wouldn’t damage or destroy your gifts, which could lead to awkward conversations! 

The same is true in reverse - storing someone else’s Christmas is a huge responsibility, and you’d feel terrible if something happened to the gifts in your care.
 

3. Consider renting a self storage unit

A self storage unit is an indoor, secure, clean space away from home. You could store all your Christmas gifts and (non-perishable) treats in there and be the only person allowed into your unit. You could rent a 10 sq ft locker (about the size of a car boot) or a small room, depending on how much you want to store and what you want to use it for. 

You could rent your storage unit early in December and keep it until Christmas Eve. During that time, you could add presents to it and take them out as and when needed. If you’re seeing your wider family between Christmas and New Year, you could keep your storage unit a little longer and keep their gifts safe and sound until your visit.

You can use shelves and boxes in your unit to keep everything organised and prevent delicate presents from being crushed or trodden on. Everything in plain sight will make seeing what you’ve already bought much easier, so you’re not tempted to over-buy when shopping last minute.

You could even install a trestle table and use your self storage unit as a wrapping room! Take all your wrapping paper, ribbons, tape and name tags, pop some Christmas music on your phone and get the whole lot done uninterrupted in a single session!

If you need to make room for guests at Christmas, you can also store excess belongings in your unit, freeing up your spare room. For instance, if your spare room is usually used as your office for working from home, you could pop your desk and chair into your self storage unit when you’re on leave so your guests have somewhere comfy to sleep.

After the big day, you might find your house cluttered with new belongings. If you’re short on storage space at home, you could choose to continue using your self-storage unit for your Christmas decorations and other excess belongings you don’t use daily. You’ll soon find that extra storage space invaluable for creating a clutter-free home.

If you choose to rent a self storage room at Safestore, the majority of our units are indoors in stores covered by CCTV, fire/burglar/pest control systems, and your unit would be secured with a padlock or keypad. If you’re unsure of how much space you’d need or would like to know more about the security and other features of your closest store, get in touch with our friendly team who can offer no-obligation information and help you reserve a unit for free if you wish.