THE XMAS STOCKING

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 10, Issue 64, 18 December 1946, Page 8 (Supplement)

THE XMAS STOCKING

NOT MUCH KNOWN OF ITS ■ ORIGIN : What is the origin of the Christ- - mas stocking? No less than eighty popular reference books are silenton the subject. We know (or are told) all about Yule logs and mistletoe and candles and Christmas trees and Santa Claus and all that, and can, if we will, assign the origin of each. But the birth of the stocking, without which—unless they resort to pillow-cases children would hardly know it was Christmas, is shrouded in obscurity. My own guess is that it came in. as a sort of logical appendage to the chimney; but a friend in the R.A.F., who has studied these things,. insists—though he cannot at the moment give chapter and verse for his contention—that it is connected with the most un-Christmas-like ideal of saving. The peasantry put away their savings in a stocking, so what could be more natural than, they should inculcate children from., the earliest years with the thrifty “stocking-habit,” and what better way than by showing them that, if they filled their own stocking during the year, Santa Claus would reward t them by filling their stocking , for them at Christmas?

Until a more carefully documented or more intrinsically probable explanation is forthcoming, I think, this should hold the field and I commend it to modern compilers of: reference books.