Tradition

Age: 50
Occupation: Tax Accountant
Residence: Newberg, OR
Performance Date: April 19, 2008
Primary Language: English

Original script/version:

Chris said, “Since the first Christmas I can remember, my family has always had this special way of delivering stockings and organizing Christmas mornings. It starts with Santa delivering the stockings in the middle of the night and putting them on the end of everyone’s bed. That way, in the morning, we could wake up and our stockings would be right there. We then had a rule that we could not leave our rooms until my parents said so. We usually decided on Christmas Eve what time we could go to the living room.”

My dad said because he had six other siblings, this tradition might have been passed between large families as a simple method of crowd control. He is pretty sure his parents did not start it. Instead of having seven little kids running around and screaming on Christmas morning, this was a way of keeping all the children occupied and quiet until the adults were ready to start the morning festivities.

This tradition was carried out by my own parents, and I like. It is not the traditional: hang-the-stockings-over-the-fireplace, but it is still our tradition. Me and my sister would always wake up at like 5:30 and meet in one of our rooms to look in our stockings. I am not aware of any other families that use this same method of delivering stockings, but my father said that in Europe, there is more variety in how people handle stockings on Christmas.