"THE" Stockings

Stockings on the mantle...that just about does it for me.  These particular stockings are special, my step-mother made them.  When I was young she made them for my brother and I, and as we married and had children she kept up with us. The Christmas after Ryan and I moved home from Ireland, we opened a box from the mail to find "our" stockings.  She had sent them to us, and we became a new family of Christmas traditions building on the shoulders of the families we came from.

It's not just the simple beauty of the stockings that makes me so happy when I look at them.  It's the love, thought and time with which they were created, and the loaded memories of past Christmases mixed with the hope of Christmases "future" that fill them and delight me every year I pull them out of the decoration box.

This year, I pulled them out to find that a mouse had tried to take some of Ryan's stocking to make a nest.  NOT COOL MR. MOUSE!  (He had come like the moths to steal and destroy something I hold dear.)  The girls ran to me crying, "There's a hole in Papa's stocking!"  I was glad to see that it was a small one, easily repaired, and I set down and righted the wrong instantly.

But, the incident made me think..."Who else knows how to make "THE" stockings?"   I never took the time to learn.  AH!  MY EMMA! She is the resident knitter, and she is the one to take on the tradition.

  It's tempting as a homeschool mom to feel the pressure to be everything my children need...mother, teacher, friend.  I'm with them ALL the time, shouldn't I be able to teach them all they should know?  NO! What a burden! What a vanity!  What a dis-service to my children! 

I am not able to teach my girls everything they need to know, or want to know.  I have given up that ideal. However, I am able to find them the teachers who CAN pass on the things I never learned, or at least give them tools they need to find out HOW to learn what they desire to know.

My step-mother has sent the pattern, and will work with Emma when we visit them.   The steps have been taken and the tradition will be passed on to a new generation to enjoy.