Christmas Stockings

The Lord of Misrule's Christmas Guide
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

Christmas Stockings - fable

Once upon a time there a feeble minded Lord whose wife had died of a fever leaving the Lord and their three daughters in great despair. To take his mind off his sorrows, the Lord set to inventing things, but because he was a man of little imagination his ideas never worked and he quickly lost his family’s fortune, forcing them to move to a lowly cottage where his daughters kept house for him doing the cooking, cleaning and sewing.

As the years went by, the daughters eventually became old enough to be married, but the Lord was even more sad and depressed because being now so poor he had no dowries to offer to prospective suitors.

One day, the daughters worked hard washing clothes all morning and all afternoon, and in the evening they hung their stockings on the mantelpiece over the fire to dry. That very night, St Nicholas was passing the house and he heard the father crying and berating himself for being so poor and leaving the girls without any dowries. Hearing the Lord’s bitter cries of grief, St Nicholas waited outside the cottage for the family to go to bed and then using great stealth he snuck inside the house and dropped a small pouch of gold coins in to each daughters’ stockings.

The next morning, when the daughters woke early for the start of another day, they tried to pull on their stockings but found them full of gold coins – more than enough to provide them with dowries for their marriages.

And so, thanks to the generosity of St Nicholas, the Lord was able to marry off his three daughters and to see them all live happily ever after.

And that’s where the tradition of hanging out stockings comes from: though there are many regional variations:

France:
Children place their shoe by the fireplace on Christmas Eve for St Nicholas to fill with gifts.

The Netherlands:
Children fill their shoes with hay and carrots for Sinterklaas’ horses.

Hungary:
Children shine their shoes and leave them near a window or external door.

Italy:
On the eve of Epiphany, 5th January, children leave out their shoes so that La Befana, the witch, can leave nice presents for good children or coal for the bad ones.

Puerto Rico:
Children put small boxes under their beds and fill them with flowers and vegetables as nourishing offerings to the Three Kings’ camels.

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