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 1976 - Bicentennial Ornament

This is the ornament that I got in my shoe on St. Nicholas Day in 1976. It commemorates the Bicentennial.

Christmas 1979 - Joe's Tree

I'm sure this tree was obtained from Grandpa Les and Grandma Jean's cabin outside Two Harbors. As part of our Thanksgiving visit we would usually cut down a big tree for our living room and one or two smaller trees for our bedrooms before we journeyed home. This tree displays many of the ornaments I got in my shoe on St. Nicholas Day. I like the goofy look on my face in the top picture. You can tell I'm trying to be precise about how that ornament is going to hang. I still do that now!

Christmas 1980 - Joe's Tree

I had my own artificial tree but in 1980 I had a real tree in my room. Kris Kringle had been giving Sam, Pete and me ornaments in our shoes every year on St. Nicholas' Day since we were babes. On this tree hangs many of those ornaments. Note the Close Encounters of the Third Kind frisbee hanging on the wall.

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.