Christmas Day & Mother's Day

Christmas Day and Mother's Day go hand-in-hand for me ... or maybe more like hand-in-stocking.

Since my childhood, Christmas has always begun the same way: We tear into stockings Mom knitted just for us, each one made in time for our own first Christmas. My brother and sisters have stockings just like mine. So do our spouses, kids and grandkids, plus a few ex- and almost-spouses and various others. 


 Mom copied the pattern from the stocking of a family friend, counting stitch-by-stitch and recording it on graph paper to make her first stocking in 1955, for my sister Becky. She used that same pattern to make her 30th stocking in 2010, for my granddaughter Ava—Mom's second great-grandchild.

 My favorite Christmas memory is of waking before dawn with my siblings and plundering our stockings, knowing they held enough treasure to tide us over until breaking light made it safe to nag our parents out of bed to open presents. We rummaged through a king's ransom of knick-knacks and candy that stretched the red, green and white yarn of the stocking to its limit: distorting our knitted names at the top, distending Santa's angora-bearded face at the shin, and bulging the crossed candy canes at the arch. 

Only now, as an adult, do I marvel at how it all got in. As a kid, I just dug and delighted, giggled and sighed, pulling out candies and a wondrous assortment of the sentimental, the silly, the fun and the practical: tree ornaments, puzzle books, playing cards, army men, jacks, Slinkys, toiletries, school supplies, and a plump Florida orange nestled in the toe.

When we became parents, we learned the how-to. The orange is your anchor. A magazine or a thin pack of notebook paper, tucked in around the calf, props the stocking open—the better for fitting in the bigger things. When those are all in place, you drop in the candy, the doohickeys and the thingamabobs.

Mom's other secret is simple Dickens: Keep the Christmas spirit all year long, and shop accordingly. Bargain bins, clearance shelves, impulse items at check-out: stocking stuffer nirvana.

Through the years, our stockings have been stuffed and emptied, torn and mended, time after time.

They captivate our children, and they make children out of us.

And even after we've dug down to that orange in the toe, they still overflow with a mother's love.

Merry Christmas, Mom. I love you.

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