The Story of the Stockings

 

The Story of the Stockings

With the end of November and the coming of Christmas, my thoughts turn naturally to the seasonal decorating of the house. And this, of course, inevitably recalls the grim, the tragic, the character-driven fate of The Story of the Stockings. It is a saga in my life emotionally comparable only to The Mystery of the Jacques Cousteau Notebook.

It began pleasantly enough in the earliest days of the Babel Family’s beginning. Mom, being a young wife and mother, wanted to start building a beautiful base of household memories and traditions. To that end, she applied to a little old lady, a local artisan, to make Christmas stockings for each of her children.

To us they were indeed ‘wonders of rare device’. The outsides were warm, soft felt and the insides were lined with satiny smooth material. Mike’s and mine were decorated with glinting Santa Claus sequin appliques (with other smaller festive items) and John’s featured a jolly young Harlequin clown with an inset face. But most miraculous of all, at this time of community juvenile property, each boasted our own name sewn at the top of our stocking. It was a reassurance: your name was known; you weren’t just part of the herd. Santa knew you.

Why this tradition stopped when it came to Kenny, I don’t know. Perhaps the old lady who made them had died. Perhaps money was growing tight. He did get his own stocking, and while perfectly fine it was not as fancy. I cannot, at the moment, recall the pattern on it. [He has told me since that it was Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer.]

But I do know why the tradition stopped and the stockings were put away. The awful years of the Jehovah’s Witnesses came upon us fully in 1970 (or so), and that, I fear, was Mom’s fault. In her innocence and wish to have friends she was lured into the cult by another nice sucker who also later left the Kingdom Hall.

That was it for Christmas for most of my childhood. The stockings, along with the other Christmas things, were packed in a box and tucked up into the rafters of the garage, which at the time was empty enough to hold the two cars it was designed for. Why they didn’t just throw it all away I don’t know, though I’m glad they didn’t. Perhaps Mom felt some sentimental attachment; I rather think part of it was they had spent good money on stuff and weren’t about to just toss it.

When my sister Susan came along in 1973 she naturally did not get a stocking, but when we finally left the JW’s (I want to say in 1976 or 77; at half our lives it had been an eternity to us) she was still young enough to benefit from the holiday and soon had her own stocking, which I believe had a teddy bear on it. We dug the Christmas stuff out, told the Elders to bite a fart, and went on our merry way. The face of John’s clown had suffered damage, but I repaired it with another face I drew on stiff posterboard. Otherwise, they were surprisingly well-preserved.

And so, we had the dear old stockings again for a while. But alas, happiness is never to last for long. As Mom’s arthritis grew worse and worse the management of Loop Drive fell more and more out of the control of her hands. I had formed a deeply sentimental attachment to the stockings and wanted to keep them safe in the old Toybox, which I had now cleaned out and was using for all my ‘treasures’. Mom would have none of that. As matriarch they were in her care, and they must reside in the parental bedroom.

Fast forward a few years. Their bedroom is now crammed with tottering piles of boxes ‘to be sorted’, and Mom is confined to a recliner in the living room. Pop (in completely understandable frustration and feeling there can be nothing worthwhile in them) moves most of the boxes out into the garage. With them, unheeded, go our precious Christmas stockings.

Fast forward more years. The garage has become a black hole of hoarding; there is only a small path to the washer and dryer. This maelstrom cannot be touched without Mom or Pop’s oversight, and since Mom cannot and Pop doesn’t care, the stockings stay buried. After Mom passes away in 1999, some time goes by before Pop starts hauling stuff out to the dump indiscriminately. It is then and there, I am sure, that the old stockings met their ultimate fate. When Pop and Mike passed away, we finally got together and carefully cleared out the garage prior to selling the house. The stockings were not found in what remained.

But in the meantime, almost immediately after Mom’s death, I had discovered at Walmart a series of stockings that oh-so-closely resembled our Christmas relics. They too were made of soft, velvety felt; they too were decorated in twinkly appliques. In a surge of nostalgia, I bought five of them, one for each of the Babel kids. There’s a teddy bear for Susan; a snowman for me; green holly for John; a carousel for Kenny; and a train on a red background for Mike. For twenty-three years now I’ve been hanging them up at Christmas time as decorations in memoriam. I still call them ‘the new stockings.’