Christmas stockings: where they came from

An old engraving of a bishop at a window handing down a bag of gold to a family of a father and three daughters. — Saint Nicholas of Bari and the Three Poor Girls, engraved by Cristofano Cartaro, 1587, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. CC0. The scene is the legend. Credits

When it is kept: Christmas Eve
Where it fits in the year: Christmas Eve and Christmas Day

No written record tells where the stocking custom began.¹ The oldest dated texts are American. An 1821 poem, "Old Santeclaus with Much Delight", is among the earliest to show stockings set out for a gift. In 1823 the poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas" was printed in the Troy Sentinel of New York on December 23. In it the stockings hang by the chimney.^1,2 By the early 1800s stockings were also used on Christmas Eve, not only on St Nicholas Day.¹

In many places children set out a shoe, not a stocking. In the Netherlands a child puts a shoe by the fireplace or the door on the evening of December 5, with a carrot or some hay for the saint’s horse.^3,4

A legend, not history

The best-known story says St Nicholas threw bags of gold through a window to pay for the weddings of three poor sisters. One bag fell into a stocking drying by the fire. The dowry story is old. The earliest telling is by Michael the Archimandrite, centuries after Nicholas lived. The stocking and the fire appear only in later retellings.^1,5,6

An explanation, not a record

The orange in the toe is often said to stand for the gold. That is a guess. Other explanations are that oranges were rare, costly treats in the 1800s, and that they fit a stocking toe well.^7,8

Sources

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