Have Christmas stockings become embarassing now?
There’s nothing quite like the unbridled thrill of waking up on Christmas morning to see a stocking that’s spilling over with presents in the corner of your room. Even those among us who’ve outgrown the ritual still feel the rush. Father Christmas has been! And he’s filled his boots with chocolate, face masks, socks, lip balms and supermarket candles!
Though most people experience stocking magic for the first time as children – when the contents sit roughly at 50 per cent plastic, 49 per cent sugar and one per cent clementine – the tradition has followed a significant chunk of the population into adulthood. A 2024 survey found that just over half of adults give a festive stocking to their partner at Christmas, at a cost of roughly £62 a pop. And the contents are grown-up too. Unlike the gifts under a tree, these little luxuries are simple, small and sought after. Or, if we’re using the official term, “bits and bobs” collected by the giver over the course of the year as an extra treat before the main event. You know, just a small something to make life a little nicer.
Top stocking gifts, according to one 2023 study, include gift cards, snacks, self-care items like lip balms and makeup. Or, on the lower end of the spectrum, 17 per cent reported receiving coal (classic), sardines, olives and toilet paper. Whatever floats Father Christmas’s boat…
“Somehow, I’m still receiving a stocking full of gifts from my parents at the age of 33,” says Katie from Liverpool, who lives in her family home. “As a kid, I always vaguely assumed that there would be a cut-off point, possibly around the time that I moved out and took on adult responsibilities, but this just never happened,” she reflects. “I feel a bit like it will maybe come to an end when all of us have partners and kids,” she adds of her siblings, “but for now, we’re all quite happy with this very ‘kidult’ set-up one day a year.”
It’s a similar story for Ellie from London, who is 32 and has received a stocking every year of her life without fail when returning to Mum and Dad’s for Christmas. “Mortifyingly, my parents still sneak into my room in the night to leave a stocking at the end of my bed,” she says. “Every year I think it’ll probably stop and it never does. I know Mum (let’s be honest, it’s not Dad or Father Christmas) really enjoys buying presents for stockings as it’s all the lower-stakes fun stuff you tend to pick up in the shops as you get closer to the till. So maybe it will continue for many years to come, for both her enjoyment and mine.”
One YouGov study found that, in the UK, 61 per cent of women purchase presents for their family compared to just eight per cent of men. As some children grow up and naivety falls away, they become aware and opt to relieve some of this labour – especially the daughters.
“For the past decade or so, my sisters and I have been buying stuff for each other’s stockings so the gift-buying burden doesn’t fall entirely on our mum,” Katie says. “We tend to be on a pretty similar wavelength: last year, they both bought me the same Pilates grippy socks without realising. For us, ‘stocking’ presents tend to be nice little extras… or weird in-jokes.”
But the women in Katie’s family are far from stopping when it comes to stockings: “Last year was the first time that my brother-in-law joined us for Christmas Day,” she says. “My mum decided that he needed a stocking of his own too, and got very concerned about whether his presents would be up to scratch. He was completely bemused by this, of course.”
When you look at it objectively, the concept of a stocking is pretty weird. According to legend, in the 4th century, Saint Nicholas heard about a man who couldn’t afford dowries for his three daughters and threw a purse of coins down the chimney of their house at night so the eldest daughter had enough money to get married. The purse fell into a stocking, which had been put by the fire to dry, and St Nicholas repeated the act until all three daughters could marry.
However, there’s no proper evidence of this ever happening, according to historian and author of Christmas: A Biography, Judith Flanders. “We have no real idea of when and where it came about,” she says. “The first mentions are in the 1810s in the US, where it appears in a little clutch of Christmas paraphernalia from one circle of friends, so our guess is that they invented it.”
This group of friends included The Nightmare Before Christmas author Clement Clarke Moore and short story writer Washington Irving, who penned The Knickerbocker’s History of New York, both of which included references to stockings. “It was supposed to be a history, but it was actually a comic satire,” Flanders says of the latter text.
“John Pintard, who was the founder of the New York Historical Society, gathered these people together, so it was presented as a history – all of these transitions – but they were all made up.”
The nice thing about there being no firm origin story for stockings is that nobody can tell you what rules to play by, meaning you can receive one until you’re 100 years old if you’ve got someone who’s willing to do all the wrapping. Age limits do not apply.
“You can do what you like,” confirms Flanders. “Hang your stocking on the fireplace. Give a stocking to your cat! No one can tell you otherwise.” That’s as good a reason as any. Kind of.
