St. Nicholas Day 2014

Found on Facebook. Remembering mornings of finding ornaments in my shoe.

Christmas 2011 - Saint Nicholas Day

I have fond memories of waking up on December 6th, Saint Nicholas Day, and finding an ornament in my shoe left by good St. Nick. Growing up I was told that this was a German tradition.

From Wikipedia:

"In Germany, Nikolaus is usually celebrated on a small scale. Many children put a boot called Nikolaus-Stiefel (Nikolaus boot) outside the front door on the night of 5 December. St. Nicholas fills the boot with gifts and sweets overnight, and at the same time checks up on the children to see if they were good, polite and helpful the last year. If they were not, they will have a tree branch (Rute) in their boots instead. Sometimes a disguised Nikolaus also visits the children at school or in their homes and asks them if they have been good (sometimes ostensibly checking his golden book for their record), handing out presents on the basis of their behavior. this has become more lenient in recent decades."

Having never received a tree branch in my shoe, I can only surmise that I must have been mostly well behaved during the year.

Christmas 1998 - Ornament

As kids, Sam, Pete and I alway got a Christmas ornament in our shoes for St. Nicholas Day. St. Nicholas Day falls on December 6th so on December 5th, just before bedtime, we'd always leave one of our shoes in the dining room. Good St. Nick always left an ornament. By the time I left home in 1990 I had quite a collection. Mom continued to buy us ornaments from time to time after we left home but we'd get them for Christmas presents and not on St. Nicholas Day. The ornament shown is based on a design by Frank Lloyd Wright. On the box I wrote "1998" so that's the year Mom gave it to me for Christmas. I have lots of other ornaments from her where I didn't note what year it came from so I'm not sure why I did for this particular ornament. Anyway, I hang it on my tree every year and I like how it picks up the light from the tree lights.

Christmas Stockings

Why does St. Nicholas leave gifts in Christmas stockings? One legend says Nicholas, a benevolent bishop in Turkey, had heard that the daughters of a villager had no dowries and so could not marry. When Nicholas came to visit them at their home, he found wool stockings had been left out to dry. He secretly filled each stocking with enough gold coins to provide for the dowries of the daughters.

As kids, Sam, Pete, and I left our stockings out on Christmas Eve and found them full on Christmas morning. We would open the presents in our stockings before going to mass and then open the presents under the tree when we returned. Not being in need of dowries, our stockings were not filled with coins of gold. They were sometimes filled with fruit and often with candy and other goodies. I remember getting Life Saver storybooks, macadamia nuts, jelly beans and more. The stockings pictured here were crocheted by my Grandma Jean in the early 1970's and used for a number of years in our family.