Buzz
While many of us carefully hang our stockings during Christmas, we rarely stop to question why we began asking Santa to fill our stinky socks with treats. What prompted this unusual tradition?
Unfortunately, there is no definitive record of the origin. One of the most famous stories involves a widowed father with three daughters. Struggling to make ends meet, he feared that his daughters, without dowries, would not find husbands. St. Nicholas, passing through town around Christmas, overheard their hardship. He quietly entered the house through the chimney, saw the stockings drying, and filled them with gold coins from his pockets as an anonymous act of generosity.
Speaking of jolly St. Nick, another possibility is that the custom of filling stockings is a variation of the old tradition of placing shoes out for St. Nicholas’s feast day on December 6. In many cultures, children leave their shoes out on December 5, sometimes with hay for St. Nick's donkey. If they’re fortunate, the hay is replaced with treats or coins by morning. Getting gifts in a stocking seems quite similar to receiving them in shoes, doesn’t it?
No matter how the tradition started, it seems people quickly realized the importance of using a decorative stocking rather than a plain sock. In 1883, The New York Times reported that,
“In the days of the plain white stocking, no one could claim that the stocking itself was a graceful or attractive object when hanging limply and empty at the foot of the bed. Now ... even the empty stocking can be a thing of beauty, and its owner can proudly display it both during the Christmas season and on other non-holiday occasions.”
As lovely as they are, it's something of a Christmas miracle that the year-round stocking never gained popularity.
