Christmas Stocking Memories: Sepia Saturday

Pixabay

Giant Christmas Stockings feature on this week's  “Sepia Saturday” prompt photograph, which dates from around the 1930’s.  My images below are from a much more recent time  and generally are  miniature in size.  But they are full of happy memories. 

Myths and legends abound.  One story maintains that St. Nolas donated to the poor by dropping coins down the chimney and they landed in stockings hanging up to dry by the fire. 


Stockings are referred to in the famous poem by Clement Clark Moore, first published  in 1823  "T'was the Night before Christmas" with the lines:

T'was the night before Christmas when all through the house

Not a creature was stirring , not even a mouse.

The stockings were hung by the chimney with care

In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there.

A Family Story  

An apocryphal vintage family story was told every year of my mother and aunt, as children, waking early and delving in the dark into their Christmas stockings. The house  did not have electricity and they thought they had come across a big bar of chocolates and opened it up to eat before breakfast - but to their dismay they found them too hard and later discovered it was a box of dominoes!

 

 Kathleen and Edith Danson - my mother and aunt, c.1916.

*************#

My Christmas Stockings 

I cannot remember having a  Christmas stocking as a child, which is a bit surprising, given my mother's craft skills, but we always hung pillowcases at the foot of our beds.  So I was determined stockings would be a part of my own Christmas traditions.

My first attempt  (1970's) at making stockings for my family was a simple patchwork,

To mark my daughter then moving to the High School in 1984, I made a new stocking of various cross stitch motifs (not the easiest task to  work out the spacing)  with Christmas greetings in different languages - plus a tartan ribbon to reflect our Scottish connection.  Like everything else featured here, it still comes down from the loft every year.
                 

              

I was then in the throws of the current craze for  cross-stitch, and here are three of my favourite Christmas tree  pieces. 

The other stockings on our tree remind  me of holiday times - the red boot from Austria, the lace stocking from Bruges in Belgium, and the brocade gold & silver one was bought in the shop at the Royal Opera House in Londion after seeing in December a magical performance by the Royal Ballet in "Sleeping Beauty". 

.

 

All Stockings with Happy Memories 

 

 A charming vintage Christmas card I found in an antique shop. 

With Best Wishes to all my Blog Readers 

********************** 

Sepia Saturday gives bloggers an opportunity

to share their family history through photograph.

 

 

Click HERE to see what other blogers have found in their Christmas Stockings.  

******************