Anyone who’s woken up on Christmas morning to find a stocking stuffed with gifts knows the excitement, but did you ever stop to wonder exactly why we hang a stocking?
The most widely recognised folklore tale is connected to St Nicholas (the forerunner to Santa Claus), who was apparently in a town in which he heard there was a recently widowed man who was so impoverished, he was worried his three daughters would never find themselves a husband. To help them out, St Nicholas slid down the chimney of the family home and dropped gold coins into the recently laundered girls’ stockings that were hanging to dry in front of the fire, before disappearing back up the chimney.
Once the tale began to spread everyone wanted some stocking action and people started hanging stockings, socks and bags at the fireplace just in case St Nicholas decided to drop them some gold.
Hanging a stocking at Christmas time had already become a tradition by the turn of the 19th century, and in 1883 The Times newspaper stated that: ‘Even the empty stocking may be a thing of beauty’.
By the Victorian era it became popular to put a piece of citrus fruit in a Christmas stocking, which is odd to us today but at the time they were rare winter treats.
