Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories - Christmas Stockings

My family had a variety of different stockings growing up. My dad's was the one he had as a boy; my mom's was a traditional looking red stocking; mine was white with a print, and Laura's, similarly, was red with a print; Anna's was a traditional red and white, like mom's.

Everyone's has their names on it. I had never loved the way the name on mine looked, so, at maybe 12 or so, I tried to rewrite it on the opposite side. That side came out worse. While I like my stocking, of course, it never 100% lived up to my ideals of what a stocking could be.

This is supposed to be the Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories, but I've got the ghost of Christmas future hanging around me these days, what with the wedding and the rest of my life coming up.

Ben and I recently discussed what to do about Christmas stockings next year, for our first married Christmas. Do we take our stockings from our parents' houses? Buy new ones? Neither one seemed right. Just buying new stockings seemed so . . . callous. How could you just replace your Christmas stocking? But taking our childhood stockings from our parents' houses seemed a little bit like, I don't know, tearing our childhood families apart. It made me sad to imagine just four stockings hanging on my parents' mantle. The stocking family would look like it had lost a child.

We came up with another option. Replacing our childhood stockings at Target seemed soulless, but I thought we could invest new stockings with lots of soul if they were homemade. I'm going to spend some portion of the next year crocheting us stockings! I may pick up some Christmas colored yarn at some after Christmas sales, or I may just use the red and white yarn I happen to have at home. At the moment, I'm leaning towards using this pattern from Crochet Today magazine. The beauty part of it is that if I vary the orders of the colors, the stockings can match without being identical, plus I can always make additional matching-but-not-identical stockings in the future, should our stocking family ever need to expand!