Four Stockings to Hang by the Chimney with Care (and Very Sturdy Hooks)

Every Christmas morning after a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, fruit salad, orange juice, and my mother's special Christmas bread, my parents and my younger sister and I open our Christmas stockings. We take turns so that everyone can enjoy seeing what the others received. My father always gets his turn last of the four because he deliberately draws out the task to an absurd degree (by such measures as say, reading aloud the ingredient lists on the edible items that he gets) in order to annoy the rest of us while we're waiting for our turns.

To fill these stockings, my sister and my mother and I all buy a bag of items each. My father, the official poster boy for emotional labour, does not buy anything for the stockings and consequently winds up with more stocking stuffers than anyone as he has three people buying items for his stocking, while the remaining three of us have just two people contributing items to our stockings. But then no one can really complain about being shortchanged when the standard size Christmas stockings we've been using are never half big enough to contain everything. There's always a selection of useful items such as razors, socks, calendars, hand lotion and the like, candy and chocolate, pretty things like Christmas tree ornaments or earrings, and some things that are just for fun, such as the pack of gold and silver stick-on tattoos I once gave my sister.

I've been the entertaining notion of making us a set of extra large Christmas stockings for a year or two, and this year I did it. My sister was strongly in favour of the plan. My mother objected that she didn't want to have to fill large stockings, but I pointed out that the reality is that we're already buying enough to fill them, and need not change our stuffer buying habits at all.

This past December I went to Fabricland and checked out the post-Christmas sales on Christmas fabrics. I absolutely loved the cardinal print you see here as soon as I saw it, and I selected a plain red fabric to go with it, as well as some red ribbon and some silver-tone bells to decorate it with. I made my own pattern for this project out of a brown paper bag, using the needlepoint stocking that you see above as a guide. As you can see, the extra-large stocking is more than double the size of the standard-size needlepoint stocking. The stockings look rather absurd at this size, and I very much doubt my mother will want to hang them anywhere in her family room. We'll likely just set them out late Christmas evening, so that my mother and sister and I can discreetly fill them. Given that they're probably not going to be used as actual hanging decorations, I rather wish I'd just made some decorative sacks, which would have been faster and easier to make, but what's sewn is sewn.

My original plan was to do two large-size stockings in red with a print lining, and two stockings in the cardinal print with a red lining, but when I got all four done that way, I found that while the red ones with the cardinal lining looked pretty good, the ones that were cardinal print with a red lining merely looked like they were inside out. I made some adjustments (the lining is a little smaller than the outer fabric, so these stockings aren't quite reversible) and turned the cardinal prints inside so that all four stockings are the same.

I'm more or less satisfied with the result. These were harder and far more time-consuming to make than I expected, but then I suppose that's to be expected when one makes a lined item from a homemade pattern. The lining wasn't as good a fit as I would have liked, and consequently the stockings have a slightly rumpled look, but after all the fussing I did over this project, I can live with that. I still need to make name tags for the stockings. My family complains bitterly about my penmanship every time they see it, so I'll print out some name tags in a decorate font on cardstock, then punch a hole in one corner and attach them to the underside of the ribbon with some embroidery floss.

It will be nice to have these to fill for Christmas 2018. Seeing half the contents of one's Christmas stocking sitting beside or in front of it spoils the surprise!