Santa, Stockings, etc.

As with all other Christmas traditions, there are a myriad of twists on the Santa tradition.  If Santa visited your house each year when you were growing up, who had stockings - just the kids or everyone?  Did Santa bring wrapped gifts or unwrapped?  Did he bring big-ticket items, your main gifts, or just smaller stuff?  Were you allowed to plunder your stocking as soon as you woke up, or did you have to get Mom & Dad up first?  Once you reached the "age of understanding" (gotta be careful how I word this; I don't know who's reading, you know), did anything change?

Growing up, my sister and I had stockings, but not my parents.  When we were younger, Santa brought really cool stuff like giant stuffed animals (once, a giraffe taller than I was!), Barbies, I think even a small desk one year, and he did not wrap the gifts.  (I didn't realize till I was an adult that for some families he did wrap them!) We weren't allowed to wake our parents up until at least 6:00 (yowza!), and then we could hit the stockings.  If my sister woke up before I did, she climbed in bed with me to wait for the magic hour; if I woke up first, I climbed in with her.  When we got older, Santa brought more practical stuff like conditioner, film for our cameras, nylons, a collapsible umbrella.  We even hit a point when Christmas Eve, my mom would tell us at some point to go to bed because "Santa's tired."  Because my mom always wanted us to eat something before we got down to the real business of opening the presents under the tree, Santa always stuck a mini box of cereal and sometimes an orange in our stockings, too.

I don't remember writing letters to Santa, and we weren't consistent about the whole "milk and cookies for Santa" thing.

In our family now, we maintain some of the same traditions, but have changed some and added others:

We each have a stocking, including the dog.  As you can see from the above picture, we even still put one up for Paul.  Like we always say, "Just because he doesn't live here in the house with us doesn't mean he's not part of our family."  He doesn't need a thing, but he still gets representation on the mantel.  Typically, my stocking has the least in it.  I'm pretty sure he puts an elf in charge of my stocking instead of handling it himself; it's pretty clear someone different is responsbible for filling it, if you get my drift.

Once we had kids, we conferred with Santa and came to an agreement that he would bring stuff the girls like, fun stuff, but that he would let us get credit for the big stuff.  Santa doesn't bother to wrap the gifts he brings; he knows we don't expect it.  He's less adamant about the whole "eating breakfast before gifts" thing, too - no cereal or fruit, though there's usually a little bit of some type of candy.  As soon as the girls wake up, they're welcome to delve into their stockings.  Usually we tell them Christmas Eve how late they have to wait to wake us up, but it's never late; we're adults, but we're not cruel!  They usually even peek a bit at ours and come to tell us some of what we've gotten. 

We typically leave some kind of snack out for Santa and the reindeer - usually dessert leftovers from Christmas Eve dinner -  and it varies from year to year how much gets eaten.

We've never had the girls write letters to Santa before Christmas, but we have occasionally had them write thank-you notes to him.  The year Paul died, Thing One did write him a letter saying she wished for a teddy bear for Paul.  This, of course, touched Santa's heart to the core, and he wrote back to her, telling her that he thought she had a great heart to be thinking of her brother, but that Paul had all he needed in heaven.

Once Hubby & I are up, we turn on the coffee and the Christmas music, and the morning begins, but more on THOSE traditions later.