Ideas For Stocking Stuffers.

When we started spending Christmas together, Sean and I realized pretty quickly how differently we handled one thing in particular: stockings.

In my house, the stocking was the main event of the whole Christmas gift-giving process. It was the thing that Santa brought. It was the thing I looked forward to the most. I vividly remember waking up throughout the night on Christmas eve and peeking out of one eye (the whole “he knows when you are sleeping” thing really got to me…) I would keep checking, keep peeking, and eventually… my filled stocking of unwrapped gifts would appear. Just like magic. I would go through the whole stocking quickly and quietly and then very carefully, repackage it, and try to go back to sleep. Of course, I couldn’t sleep so I would go to my parent’s room and show them the stocking contents in its entirety. And then once the sun came up, and my aunts were awake, I’d go through it again… and again and again. As the morning moved forward, I would move onto unwrapping presents which were not from Santa. But the big deal, for me, was always the stocking.

In Sean’s house, his stocking was opened only after all the presents were opened and everything in his stocking was wrapped! And they hung near the fireplace; they weren’t laid out on the bed. Santa brought most of the presents too, appearing under the tree only on Christmas morning. That was a shock to me, because I grew up seeing all the presents as they were wrapped under the tree for the entire month!

When we started having kids we combined traditions, and compromised. We decided:

Stockings are opened first. Everything in them is unwrapped. They hang at the fireplace.
In addition to the stocking, Santa brings each kid an unwrapped gift. This is usually the thing they “asked Santa for” since those items tend to be larger and don’t fit inside the stocking.
Santa brings one family gift: we’ve done a Dress-Up box, an arts and crafts box, the Nugget Couch, a Board Game collection, etc.
All presents show up under the tree on Christmas morning.
All presents that show up under the tree on Christmas morning are from us.

Here are some stocking ideas for this year!