Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Nothin's Cookin' This Christmas

     I'm too busy with stockings.  I have to do stockings or it's not Christmas.  This year there were so many things to go into the stockings that auxiliary stockings had to be purchased.  Soap, hand lotion, small toys, candy, crackers, chocolate coins, flavored chocolate apples, scented tags for car mirrors, emery boards, oddly shaped pens, a rolling pin, 6 shot glasses, spices, flavored salts, ouzo flavored candies, pez dispensers in the shapes of characters from the Lord of the Rings, miniature spice boxes for travelers in middle-America, note pads shaped like cup-cakes, post-it notes with colorful designs; all have been sorted out to the appropriate recipient. Six stockings for my six closest relatives.
     Why? The one empty stocking is mine.  And that is why I do stockings, religiously at Christmas.  It is in the futile hope that my mother will fill mine, as she did a half-century ago.  I actually do not remember what was in them, except tangerines. Yet, they remain my secret of the season.  Jamming into a small space the excitement, the surprise, the love she showed by creating them.  Somehow my frantic collecting and sorting of items doesn't quite match up to what I felt as a babe.
     So I wonder, should I continue this post-nightmare-Scrooge-like dispensing of trifles in hosiery?  If it is for myself that I do it, is it really loving or generous?  Once upon a time, my mother went on strike and didn't cook a turkey for Christmas.  I can remember the absence of wafting turkey grease as if it were yesterday.  Perhaps one year I will give up my stocking compulsion and gauge the reaction of the non-recipients.  Or maybe I won't.