‘Twas the Night Before Christmas

Do you remember feeling like a grown-up, being given the responsibility of an adult, allowed to do your parent’s special project for the first time? I had one of those experiences and it was such a wonderful feeling to be treated like an adult. I was a serious child and tried to perform my very best at every age. But some things can’t be rushed like skipping childhood quickly to become an adult.

It was Christmas Eve and I was quite young and my parents had always encouraged me to do adult kinds of things. This year was one of those times. They told me that I could be in charge of filling the Christmas stockings with little gifts and then hanging them from the mantel. I was in seventh heaven. Imagine that. Me. Doing such a grown-up thing.

When my parents went to bed, I assembled all the things that were designated to go in the socks. I looked around and couldn’t find socks that were sturdy enough to hang from a mantel with candies and gifts. Then I spotted my father’s new black, silk, knee-high socks and proceeded to fill them.

I laid them out on the table and started pushing goodies into them but then I realized that all the goodies in our county couldn’t fill those socks. Keep in mind that in those days, there were no commercial Christmas socks made out of felt and sewn together for their strength so we used our own socks.

Since no one knew that I was going to use my father’s silk, knee-high socks, no one told me that they stretch very easily. So, there I sat at the table with these socks laid out flat, stuffing things into them.

The trouble with that was that knee-high silk socks keep stretching as they are filled. In frustration at not having enough gifts to go from the soles of the socks to the tops, I grabbed some oranges and pushed them into the bottoms of the socks and then put the little gifts on top of them and hung them up on the mantel.

The next morning, when we all came downstairs to wish each other a Merry Christmas and open our presents, my father was more surprised than pleased to see his new, silk, knee-high socks dragging on the floor, stretched so far down, that each sock could have fit two or three legs into them.

My wonderful feeling of being treated like an adult didn’t last very long. After that experience, I was back to being treated like a child for the next few years.

https://youtu.be/v_W0xUgGILY