Christmas stocking
A stocking hung by the fireplace on Christmas Eve for Santa Claus to fill. Clement Clarke Moore’s poem of 1823 has “the stockings were hung by the chimney with care”; older European customs put the saint’s gifts in shoes.
Meaning
In Moore’s A Visit from St. Nicholas the stockings hang by the chimney “In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there”, and the saint “filled all the stockings; then turned with a jerk” and went back up the chimney. In the Netherlands, Jeroen Dewulf of the University of California, Berkeley says, children still leave a carrot or turnip for Sinterklaas’s horse in a wooden shoe by the chimney.
Origin and history
Before stockings there were shoes. Clement Miles (1912) describes children in the Netherlands and Belgium putting out their shoes on St Nicholas’s Eve with hay, straw or a carrot for the saint’s white horse or ass, and finding sweets or toys in place of the fodder if they had been good, a rod if not. At Ypres, he writes, children hung up stockings filled with hay for St Martin’s horse on the saint’s eve and found presents in them the next morning. In France, children found their stockings full on New Year’s morning, and in Italy the Befana, the old woman of the Epiphany, put playthings and sweets in the stockings of good children and only a birch and coal in those of children who had misbehaved. John Brand quotes Naogeorgus mocking mothers who hid “caps, and shooes, and petticotes” for their children on St Nicholas’s Eve, and records an Italian court custom, the Zopata, of hiding presents in the shoes and slippers of those one wished to honour.
Did the Dutch of New Amsterdam hang stockings?
The story is told, but the evidence is missing. Mary L. Booth’s History of the City of New York (1859) has Dutch children hanging their stockings, “carefully labelled”, in the chimney corner for Santa Claus. Charles W. Jones checked the newspapers, diaries, books and other records of the colonial period in 1954 and found that “the picture is not substantiated”. Nor does Brand’s version of the legend of St Nicholas and the three poor daughters put the dowry in a stocking: the purse goes in at their father’s bedroom window.
Read next
- Next in Christmas symbolsCandy caneA hooked stick of peppermint candy, white with red stripes, hung on Christmas trees. The story that it was made as a J for Jesus, white for his purity and red for his blood, is a modern legend: no record supports it.
- The same shape in Thanksgiving symbolsTurkeyThe turkey is the bird at the head of the American Thanksgiving table. The one eyewitness account of the 1621 harvest at Plymouth mentions fowl and deer but never names the turkey; the roast turkey became the holiday’s centrepiece in nineteenth-century New England, where Sarah Josepha Hale’s writing put it at the head of the table.
See also
St Nicholas and Santa Claus, Nativity scene, Star of Bethlehem, Advent wreath, Christmas tree, Holly.
Sources
- A Visit from St. Nicholas (Clement Clarke Moore), Clement Clarke Moore, first published anonymously in the Troy Sentinel, 23 December 1823; Poetry Foundation text, as archived 24 September 2026, Poetry Foundation, poem text
- Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan (Clement A. Miles, 1912), Clement A. Miles, Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1912); Project Gutenberg e-text 19098, Internet Archive (Project Gutenberg text), chapters VII, VIII, XV and XVI
- Knickerbocker Santa Claus (Charles W. Jones, 1954), Charles W. Jones, The New-York Historical Society Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 4, October 1954; reproduced by permission by the St. Nicholas Center, St. Nicholas Center, article text
- Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, vol. 1 (John Brand, ed. Henry Ellis, 1853), John Brand, Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, arranged and revised by Sir Henry Ellis, vol. 1 (London: Bohn, 1853), Internet Archive (University of Toronto copy), St. Nicholas's Day, p. 420
- For the Dutch, Santa is tall and skinny. What happened to him in America? (Berkeley News, 2023), Ivan Natividad, Berkeley News, 21 December 2023; interview with Jeroen Dewulf, Queen Beatrix Professor of Dutch Studies, UC Berkeley, University of California, Berkeley, interview with Jeroen Dewulf
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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