The house I grew up in didn’t have a fireplace. We tried to hang our Christmas stockings above the vent which shot the heat into the living room from the woodstove in the basement. But Mom took them down, claiming that we would start a fire with that kind of shenanigans. Instead we had to hang our stockings on the built-in bookcase in the little alcove outside the bedrooms.
When I moved my own family into our house in 1990, I was so excited that now we had a fireplace and could have a place to hang the kids’ stockings. Over the years, I got a little carried away with the stockings. Everyone in the household had to have one, which of course included the pets. Theirs were smaller than the ones belonging to the people in our house, but all stockings had the names inscribed in the white fur trim.
Unfortunately, those pets started dying. And what was I to do with their stockings? A few years ago, I started the memory wall. I know, how Christmasy is that? But if you can’t remember family members who have passed on at Christmas, when can you remember them? And though she hasn’t passed on, our exchange student from Portugal has a stocking on the memory wall too.
Shadow and Pepper were our two cocker spaniels who died within a month of each other in 2007. Pebbles and BamBam were the cats I got from my sister. Keshia (whose sock you can barely see) was the black cat we brought all the way from Colorado. She died in 2004 at the age of 19. And Ines, my Portuguese daughter. Can you believe I never had socks for the two hamsters or the guinea pig?
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