Day Twenty Two of Blogging Challenge

     The hanging of Christmas stockings goes back a couple hundred years. Here is a link to the history from the Smithsonian Magazine if you are interested.

     In my family, stockings were a very big deal! Usually, on Christmas morning, we would delve into them before we ate breakfast. And Dick and I carried the tradition on with our girls. Our second Chrisrmas together found us with a 10 month old baby in Alaska where Dick was stationed! I was bound and determined to start and build those family traditions but being as poor as the proverbial church mouse, we couldn't afford to buy a stocking.  So I bought some red, green and white felt fabric and made our baby a stocking!

      Then three and a half years later, we added another adorable baby girl so I made another stocking to match the first one. Time passed; my older daughter got married - another stocking; two grandchildren joined the family- and I decided Dick should have one also! So three more. A year or two later, Dick bought a huge fuzzy stocking for ME!  I guess he thought I needed to have a big one to make up for all those years I didn't have one.

Christmas Stockings

      Can you guess which one is mine???  Last year was my first Christmas without Dick but my sweet girls wanted to make Christmas as normal as possible. So somehow they spirited my humongous stocking away and filled with goodies! Well, I have been informed that "BIG FOOT" is being retired and will be replaced with a more normal- sized stocking for this year! I think it was a little hard to come up with enough stuff to fill it out and I am just fine with that! We still have traditions to carry on!