Stocking Up
Like all good legends, the story of the Christmas stocking has many versions. The original story has evolved to allow for differences in culture, time period, and good old fashioned story-telling. So it’s hard to know exactly how the Christmas stocking tradition started. Too much exactness though isn’t any fun! So here are the most well-known versions of the story:
The first version goes that there was a father with three beautiful daughters. Although the daughters were kind and strong, the father despaired of them ever making good marriages because he didn’t have enough money to pay their dowries. One day, St. Nicholas of Myra was passing through their village and heard the locals discussing the plight of these poor girls. St Nicholas knew the father would be too proud to accept an outright gift. So he waited till dark, went to the man’s house, and dropped three bags of gold coins down the chimney.
The daughters had spent the evening washing clothes and had hung their stockings by the fireplace to dry. The gold coins dropped into the stockings, one bag for each daughter. In the morning, they awoke to find enough money to make them each a generous dowry and all married well and happily. As word of St. Nicholas’ generosity spread, others began to hang their stockings by the fireplace, hoping for a similar gift.
There is plenty of debate about when American children started hanging their stockings by the fire on Christmas Eve. Some give credit for the idea to Thomas Nast, who drew stockings on the mantelpiece in his 1886 illustrations for a George Webster story called “Santa Claus and His Works.” Thomas Nast (September 27, 1840 – December 7, 1902) was a famous German-American caricaturist and editorial cartoonist in the 19th century and is considered to be the “Father of the American Cartoon.”
While Nast did create the popular modern image of Santa Claus as a white-bearded, red-suited, boot-wearing jolly man, he isn’t responsible for the stocking tradition. That’s because Clement Clark Moore’s famous poem, “A Visit from St. Nicholas” was written 64 years earlier. And as every Christmas buff knows, that poem includes the following immortal lines: “The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, in hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there.”
Like most American customs, the Christmas stocking probably came across the ocean with generations of immigrants. Perhaps some Catholics knew the legend of St. Nicholas. The second version is that some Dutch transformed their tradition of putting out clogs full of straw for Santa’s reindeer.
It’s said that children placed wooden shoes next to the hearth on the 5 December, the night traditionally associated with St Nicholas or Sinterklaas. The children would fill their shoes with straw (for the white horse that carried the gifts) and food for St Nicholas. Stockings, pillow cases or shop-bought ‘Santa sacks’ were substituted for the shoes in Britain, most of Europe and in North America with the popularisation of Father Christmas or Santa Claus during the 20th Century.
Italian children brought the idea of putting out their shoes for La Bufana, the good witch. And in classic American tradition, all these legends and customs mixed together (along with a few home-grown ideas) and before long the Christmas Stocking became an essential part of how we celebrate Christmas. Here in New Zealand we tend to simply put the presents under the tree, we’re fairly utilitarian like that, the excitement is still the same, the wondering as high and the anticipation expectant. All the best ingredients for a good start to gift opening wouldn’t you say? I would.
