Today, I received an early gift.
My girlfriend and I went shopping for stockings. To hang on the chimney with care. Which is a problem because we don’t even own a chimney, either of us. Well, we don’t own any sort of home, but we don’t even RENT chimneys. So we’re kinda fucked on that one.
But, stockings were a necessity. I don’t know if the necessity part is what goes in or just that they hang, but there’s a mission and I’m on it.
Stockings have always felt like a weird middle ground when it comes to Christmas. At home, when I was a kid, stockings were usually the compromise. You could open your stockings before the parents got out of bed, but no actual presents. The stockings usually had stuff in them like candy, so in a way this was probably a very bad call on my parents’ part. “You can’t open a present, but go ahead and eat as much chocolate as you can before the sun crests the horizon. That seems fine.”
I was also horrified to learn that people used to receive FRUIT in their stockings. Fruit, as in an orange.
Yes, at this point I sound like the total privileged, first-world piece of shit that I am. But c’mon. You can’t just take something from a bowl on a table and then pretend it’s a present. That’s like the worst form of re-gifting, as if I made a sandwich for me, then decided you could have it. Oh, and I stuffed it in a sock first.
I will say this for a stocking: it’s a pretty good way to wrap shit. Just stuff it in a big boot, call it a day. I wish all of our presents were so simple.
So I guess it’s not so much the stocking itself I have a problem with. It’s the contents.
Which is why I was sort of confused and delighted that my girlfriend said she’d make me a stocking.
We went to a couple places, and nothing really looked good. I was kind of ready to just pick something, figuring it’d gain meaning over time, but then she suggested that I could pick out a fabric and she could make one. Which had honestly never occurred to me, and from there it was a simple matter of picking between two Marvel comics fabrics, selecting a winner, then hesitating because I wondered if there might be a Ghostbusters fabric, then ultimately going with the Marvel because that’s more than good enough and it’s not 1989.
And now, dear friends, I own a stocking. A real one. That’s all my own.
Oh, and I guess I better figure out some things to put in my girlfriend’s stocking. Besides oranges. Are Satsumas close enough to oranges that they ruin my whole point?