Hanging Stockings With Care

Christmas Traditions after a Loved One Dies

Dec 17, 2023

Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there.
Clement Clarke Moore, A Visit from St. Nicholas

"What will I do with Sebastian's stocking?"

After my son died, this was one of my first thoughts.

I felt selfish thinking this. I dearly loved my son, yet I was thinking about his Christmas stocking.

***

I love everything about Christmas.

I can't wait to decorate the house and make it beautiful every holiday season. Our family traditionally cuts down a tree the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Living in the Pacific Northwest typically means putting on raincoats and rainboots and trudging through mud and varying degrees of precipitation in search of the perfect six-foot Noble or Douglas fir that would grace our living room from December until the New Year.

But after Sebastian died in September 2017, I didn't know what to do anymore. I was in shock and grief. My usual festive demeanor shattered. I had been busily making Christmas presents and had Sebastian's ornament ready to place in his stocking.

Suddenly, I didn't know what to do with his stocking.

Could I still hang it up?

Was there a “how to” manual about Christmas traditions after a loved one has died?

During that confusing and devastating period of my life, I wrote about Sebastian's stocking:

"I don't think I can do it. I can't hang his stocking up. It scares me, and it hurts too much to look at it now. How sad it is lying empty in its Christmas box. I feel stupid thinking these stupid random things so soon after he's gone. Shouldn't I be thinking more noble thoughts, on what, I don't know. I don't know what to think and yet I can't get these thoughts about his stocking out of my head.”

***

As a child, I had an ugly Christmas stocking.

It was a traditional red felted and white furred stocking, which my mom had haphazardly glued on colored cardboard letters with my name over the white trim.

At the time, I didn't think it was ugly. I loved hanging it up with my brother's similarly glued-lettered stocking during the Christmas season. I was the one who initiated getting the Christmas decorations from storage and decorating the house and tree every year. My mom was usually busy working two jobs, spending time with her current boyfriend, or drinking at the local bar to be interested in making our home festive for the holidays.

On Christmas morning, I expected to find in my stocking winter socks, a Pez candy dispenser, Life Savers, Tootsie rolls, and sometimes an orange in the toe. Over the years, the letters gradually fell off, but the hardened glued remnants on the aforementioned white trim remained, never to be repaired or replaced unless I tried to fix it.

When my husband was a boy, his mother made Christmas stockings for him and his older brother and sister. Bev cut each stocking out of red felt, and then they were adorned with a 1960s-looking Santa and festooned with glittery sequins, jingle bells, and candy canes. Each child's name was cut from white felt, and Bev carefully glued each letter on the top. Since then, she has made these same stockings for numerous grandchildren. Over the years, the red felt has faded, but Bev's stockings have never come unglued, and to this day, they continue to adorn mantlepieces in many family homes.

At Christmas time, during the first three years of our marriage, I would hang up our mismatched stockings together. They looked like mis-mated socks hanging out to dry. Even more striking was their visual representation of our very different childhood homes.

When we started considering having children, I wanted to create new traditions for our family; a new beginning, as it were, something special for us.

Soon after Sebastian was born, I found a beautiful stocking pattern and began knitting him a red, green, and white wool Christmas stocking. The knitted design made it look like a cozy Irish Aran sweater, which I painstakingly crafted using double-pointed needles. After completing it, I sewed his name on the top, weaving each letter into the stitches with red thread.

It was stunning, and I loved that stocking.

It was my favorite Christmas decoration.

Two years later, Isabel was born, and I lovingly knitted her a matching stocking in the same hues and added her name to it as well. Together, they looked beautiful over our fireplace.

It was quite the contrast, our dissimilar stockings next to their color-coordinated matching ones.

The following year, I threw away my forlorn stocking, knitted myself the same stocking I had made for Sebastian and Isabel, and stitched Mamma on the front. I had no remorse in tossing my ragged stocking; it represented too many sad events about past holidays, and I was determined to make new memories of Christmas.

Steve didn't want me to knit him a stocking since he had the one his mom had created for him as a child. Therefore, I hung up our three matching stockings on the mantle over our fireplace and then hung up Steve's childhood stocking next to ours. Steve's stocking looked sadly out of place, but I filled each with goodies and gifts and said nothing.

We had a wonderful Christmas that year.

When I began taking down the Christmas decorations the day after New Year's, Steve approached me with his stocking and held it out.

"Could you make me a matching stocking for next Christmas?"

I was thrilled and soon after started knitting.

The following Christmas, four matching red, green, and white knitted stockings were hung carefully on the mantelpiece.

Life was perfect, and I somehow felt complete.

***

For over twenty years, I have hung up these stockings. They are the first Christmas decorations I put up every year, and I cherish them. Is it wrong to love something so much? It's not the stockings per se that I loved, but what they represented. They personified our close-knit family, traditions, and memories; the four of us, complete and together. They reminded me of beautiful Victorian Christmas cards, idyllic and optimistic for the future. I knew they were only stockings, but they instilled sentimental simplicity at its finest.

And then they didn't.

***

I told Isabel my horrible thoughts about Sebastian's stocking. Shame overwhelmed me amid my grief.

But I felt incomplete.

I was incomplete.

Death had ripped Sebastian out of my life. His empty stocking was a permanent reminder of his absence.

"What should I do?" I asked her.

Without even a pause, Isabel replied, "We hang it up. He's still my brother and your son."

She grabbed my hand and squeezed it. "We put it up. He's still Sebastian. It'll be challenging, but we must hang it up; it's tradition.

My all-of-a-sudden-grown-up-daughter turned her head and peered at the empty mantel, "It wouldn't look right without it hanging up with ours."

She smiled. "We will always hang up his stocking."

Isabel was right.

When did my daughter become so wise? I knew she was struggling and missed her brother, too.

She felt his absence as much as I did.

***

We removed the Christmas boxes from the attic two months after Sebastian's death. Isabel began opening lids, rummaging through each one, oohing and awing over every Christmas ornament and decoration until she finally found our family stockings hidden under the tree skirt, nestled neatly together. My daughter gently pulled out Sebastian's stocking, still pristine after twenty-four years of use. With a shaky hand, Isabel walked up and hung it on the right side of the mantlepiece. She returned to the box, retrieved her stocking, and placed it beside her brother's.

Her mission completed, Isabel, with tears streaming down her face, walked over to me, hugged me, and we sobbed together, missing Sebastian.

I desperately wanted to know if next Christmas would be any better.

***

Seven Christmases have come and gone without Sebastian on this earth.

Sebastian's stocking is hung yearly on the mantlepiece. But now it's accompanied by a new stocking I knitted for Isabel's husband, Brennan. I tried giving Isabel and Brennan their stockings when they married and moved to their place.

Isabel said, "I can't take them, The stockings all need to be together."

Sebastian's untimely death will always be a part of our family's story, but it's not devastating anymore. We've been discovering our "new normal, and we are thriving again.

Every year has gotten more manageable, the tears are less frequent, and when they do come, they are not so monumental.

We laugh more; we remember funny stories about Sebastian and laugh even more.

I know, without a doubt, that the only reason I can celebrate Christmas each year after Sebastian's death and continue to hang up his stockings is because of the hope that has been in me throughout all my pain, suffering, and grief.

God loved me so much that he made himself known to a young teenage girl from Nazareth over two thousand years ago, telling her not to be afraid and that she had found favor with God. She was to give birth to a baby, a son, and call him Jesus. He would save all people from their sins, and his kingdom would be everlasting.

Jesus was born in Bethlehem, and my world was never the same again.

Merry Christmas.