Do pests damage holiday lights or wiring during winter storage?

It's tempting to think of chewed wiring as collateral damage from a rodent looking for food nearby, but the mechanism is more direct than that. Rodent incisors are open-rooted and grow continuously through the animal's life, so gnawing on hard-ish, edged material is routine wear-and-tear maintenance rather than a foraging behavior. That's the same biology behind rodents chewing plastic storage totes, and it applies just as directly to the insulated copper inside a string of holiday lights.

University of Kentucky Entomology documents the consequence plainly: mice 'gnaw through electrical wiring, causing fires and failure of freezers, clothes dryers and other appliances.' That's not a hypothetical — it's cited as an established pattern in appliance and structural wiring, and a coiled cord in a cardboard box is an easier target than most of the wiring in a house, because it's unprotected and often sitting right next to the nesting material a mouse would use anyway.

The fix mirrors the storage cluster's established answer for any attractant: get it out of a soft, open container and into something hard-sided with a tight lid, off the floor. A metal storage box or a thick plastic bin with a good gasket does most of the real work; a cardboard box, even a sturdy one, gives a rodent both the cable and the bedding in the same package.

Before plugging any stored string back in, run your hand along its length and look closely at the insulation. Gnawed spots expose bare wire, and an energized bare wire is a fire risk independent of whether the light string still technically works — this is the one place in the storage cluster where the honest advice is 'discard it,' not 'patch it.'