How can I keep pests out of holiday decorations and storage boxes?

Holiday decorations spend roughly eleven months a year sitting undisturbed in a garage or attic, which is exactly the profile rodents look for: dark, quiet, and untouched for long stretches. A plain cardboard box shreds easily and readily becomes bedding, which is why extension guidance on rodent control names cardboard specifically as material to physically remove, not just seal (NPIC).

Swap the box, not the decorations. A hard-sided bin with a tight lid removes the nesting material in one move, and it's the same fix the flagship storage question on this hub already establishes for anything you want protected over a New Hampshire winter: metal and glass are the only container classes a gnawing rodent can't defeat, and heavy plastic buys time rather than certainty. For decorations specifically — mostly inert plastic, glass ornaments, string lights — a good hard-sided plastic tote with a tight lid is a reasonable trade-off; for anything genuinely valuable or food-adjacent, go harder.

Popcorn garlands, dried citrus slices, pinecone ornaments rolled in seed and peanut butter, gingerbread — these aren't decorations to a mouse or a pantry moth, they're food, and storing them boxed up with everything else for a winter is functionally the same as storing birdseed in a garage. The pantry-pest biology is identical: stored-product insects live, eat, and grow inside dry organic goods, and infestations often start before the item is even packed away (University of Minnesota Extension; NC State Extension).

The fix costs nothing: don't put food-based decorations into long-term storage at all. Compost them or throw them out at the end of the season instead.

Rodents travel along walls and floor edges, not open floor space — it's the same logic behind why boxes stacked directly on a garage floor, against the wall, are found chewed more often than boxes on a shelf. Elevating storage a few inches with a simple shelf unit, and leaving a gap between boxes and the wall, denies the quiet travel route as much as it denies the box itself.