Ah, the most wonderful time of the year—time to decorate for Christmas! Except, let’s face it: Sometimes this can be a nightmare. You go to the storage closet, pull out all the bins of holly, jolly décor, and then the reality sets in Everything is a mess. Your Christmas lights are completely tangled and it’ll take you hours to unravel the disaster!

Sounds all too familiar, huh? We’ve all carelessly tossed in the Christmas décor when taking everything down around New Years’ the previous year. You might think you’ll just worry about it for the following year, but when that rolls around, you may not be too happy with your last year’s self!

While everything before Christmas is merry, the days following the holiday can be not so fun. So this year, why not give your next year’s self a break? It’s time to finally start putting care into tucking away the Christmas décor neatly—starting with the lights.

We promise, keeping your Christmas decor organized is not as time-consuming as it might seem in the moment. To avoid that pre-holiday struggle next year, a company called Porch brings us several clever tricks to storing your Christmas lights! With these simple yet brilliant techniques, you can have tangle-free lights when you get ready to decorate next Christmas, hopefully taking away a little of that holiday stress we all know too well.

The first two hacks in the video below are so simple, you’ll wonder why you’ve never done them before. Not only can it help you organize your lights for next year, but you can also find good use for two items you may throw away or recycle weekly: Paper towel rolls and newspapers.

For the first trick, all you need to do is simply tape two or three paper towel rolls together, and then roll your lights around them. Poof! They’re ready to go neatly into the box and easily unravel for next year. This works the same with a rolled-up newspaper, except it’s a bit sturdier.

You can view these tricks and other brilliant hacks in the video below.

How do you usually store your Christmas lights? Are you someone who haphazardly throws them into the box, or do you neatly wrap them? Do you have any other good tricks to make sure they’re organized for the next year? Will you try any of these tricks from Porch when putting away the decor this year?