I want my Mom to live forever. I know everyone loves their Mom but I have very selfish reasons for wanting her immortality. You see my sister says that after Mom dies we won’t have Christmas stockings anymore. I am fifty-two years old and I love my Christmas stocking.
How did Christmas stockings start in the Swallow household? What do I remember? When I was little, Christmas stockings were lovely things like a long fat lumpy sausage. We did for a while have a pillow case to store all those wonderful things that Father Christmas brought and there was the odd year when we used large colourful plastic sacks; but they were rubbish and besides they made a loud crackling sound when you tried to delve into them at some ungodly hour of the morning and that brought trouble. There is nothing, really absolutely nothing like a long fat stocking.
We knew quite a bit about what we would find in our stocking when we discovered it at the foot of the bed early on Christmas morning. Sometimes very early on Christmas morning, sometimes “Shut up and go back to sleep!” early. There would be some money down near the toe, usually a two-shilling piece or perhaps half a crown. Yes it was that long ago. Then there was a walnut, a brazil nut, an almond and a filbert. Then there was an apple and a tangerine, all down near the toe. There was usually a pink sugar mouse or it might sometimes be a white mouse with a little stringy tail. Some chocolate coins covered in bright shiny golden foil would glisten in the light from the bedside lamp or the torch if I were being furtive in the early hours. The chocolate wasn’t of a very good quality. We didn’t really like the taste of it and in later years have sought out Cadbury coins to raise the quality of our Christmas plunder.
A chocolate Father Christmas or a Christmas tree or bauble in brightly coloured foil might be discovered. I think they were really meant to hang on the tree. They were awkward to eat as when you bit into them they collapsed and fragments of chocolate showered everywhere and woe betide you if they went in among the warm bedclothes to melt and smear on the flannelette.
The days of stockings have, sadly, passed. I suppose we could still get them but they would have to be bought specially, an unnecessary expense. There was something special about the feel of a stocking. I don’t want you to think I have any sort of fetish about such female attire. The sensuality in them was Christmas sensuality. There was a soft feeling with hard corners and unusual contours. There was that special pleasure of negotiating the release of a bulky parcel from a long way down, carefully easing it this way and that to avoid laddering the nylon and making extraction more difficult. Then there was the necessity of holding this greatly elongated shape high in the air, allowing the stocking to swing round, because at those places along its length where no parcel lurked the stocking twisted and made it hard for small questing fingers to reach the next mysterious package.
When we were small we opened our stockings on our own. We were much too eager to wait for sluggards to wake before we plundered Santa’s bounty. As we grew older we waited for others to ease into consciousness or dragged them rudely to life and into our parent’s bed where stockings were explored in turn so that each might share in the joy, amusement or puzzlement at some of the things that emerged.
Not all the things that Santa brought were toys or even regarded as vaguely useful. There were items that had caught someone’s eye when shopping and had tickled someone’s fancy or nudged their sense of the humorous or bizarre. I have some circular playing cards in my bedside drawer that I doubt I shall ever use and plastic insects on springs that jumped about when you pushed them down. I’ve just remembered, I used to get bath cubes. Whatever happened to bath cubes?
Anyway, now we use tights. This has introduced the possibility of greater storage space and now that we have partners, we can have one leg each. We still have stockings. Now that none of us believe in Father Christmas (heaven forbid) we know that Mom put our stockings together. Since Mom had a stroke and the years have taken their toll on her active life my sisters Josie and Chris do the job and my wife Julie has been lovingly educated in the Swallow way of stocking filling. I too have my little tasks, making sure that Julie’s stocking does not lack because of concentration in providing for others.
Can you imagine how I felt when Julie told me about the end of Christmas stockings? I was devastated. It won’t happen you know. I won’t let it; if necessary I will do it all myself. The best part of Christmas is my stocking. I still find it hard to sleep on Christmas Eve because I look forward to finding it there in the morning and that is after I have filled the thing from carefully labelled carrier bags hidden in the wardrobe. The rest of Christmas is anti-climax. I have only one more thing to say on the matter.
LONG LIVE MOM!!!