Sally Breslin: My Life: THE JOYS OF A THOUGHTFULLY STUFFED CHRISTMAS STOCKING

As I write this, Christmas is only two days away. I will be spending Christmas with my friend Nancy and her husband, and she recently e-mailed me to ask me to bring the Christmas stocking they gave me last year...so they can refill it.

They don’t have to ask me twice. Last year they filled it with everything from jewelry, postage stamps and lottery scratch-tickets to gift cards and makeup. When it comes to filling Christmas stockings, they definitely know their stuff.

I’ll never forget the first year I fully understood what Christmas stockings were all about. I was about three years old and my parents told me to hang the stocking on my bedpost (because we had no fireplace) and Santa would creep into my bedroom after I fell asleep and fill the stocking with treats.

Sounded like a pretty neat idea to me. So that Christmas Eve, I eagerly hung my little red stocking on my bedpost and began the long wait for Santa. Every half-hour during that 200-hour night, I reached over to feel the stocking to see if Santa had been there yet. And for some reason, every time I opened my eyes, my mother was standing right there, with her hands behind her back. When I’d cheerfully greet her, she’d roll her eyes, sigh and tell me to go to sleep or Santa never would come. When I opened my eyes again and saw her by my bed, I could swear she was sleeping standing up.

Finally, I did manage to doze off, but within 20 minutes, I was awake and feeling my stocking. I gasped. It was full! I was so excited, I yanked it right off the bedpost and dashed into my parents’ bedroom.

“Mommy! Daddy! Santa came!” I cried, whacking my poor father right on the head with the stocking. “And look what he bringed me!!”

Funny, but after that year, Santa put only really soft things in my Christmas stocking.

The next year, seeing I was a seasoned veteran of stocking-hanging, I was even more gung-ho about the whole thing. I’d had all year to think about it, and I’d come to the conclusion that Christmas stockings were a pretty simple way to rake in a good haul if I just used a little ingenuity. Yes, I’m ashamed to admit, I became greedy.

So when it came time to hang my Christmas stocking, I also unloaded my whole drawer of socks and hung them all over my room. They were for my dolls, I told myself. After all, I reasoned, my dolls were my “babies” and they were human to me, so they deserved a few treats, too, didn’t they? The fact that they wouldn’t actually be able to chew the candies or eat the cookies in the stockings didn’t matter. I was more than willing to help them out.

When my mother saw all of the stockings hanging in my bedroom, she looked concerned. “I don’t think Santa will bring enough treats to our house to fill all those stockings,” she said. “You can’t be too greedy. You have to make sure Santa will have enough left to fill the stockings of all the other little boys and girls in the world.”

I gave her my very best pouty face. “But I love my dollies,” I said. “Doesn’t Santa love them, too?”

My mother just smiled stiffly. A few minutes later, I heard my father rush out of the house. Sure enough, when I woke up on Christmas morning, there was something in every single stocking. Looking back now, I sill feel pretty guilty about it. My poor parents must have had to take out a second mortgage just to fill all those stockings…and keep me believing that Santa never would forget anyone, not even dolls.

But I wound up learning my lesson. By the time I ate all the candy in Ginny’s, Betsy Wetsy’s, Cinderella’s, Raggedy Ann’s, Minnie Mouse’s, Tiny Tears’ and everyone else’s stockings, I had the worst stomachache in the history of all four-year-olds.

The first year I was married, I decided to try to recapture the excitement of stocking-hanging that I’d experienced as a little kid. I bought a festively decorated stocking for myself and a matching one for my husband, and carefully hung them near the Christmas tree. Then I threw hints.

“You know, when I was young,” I told my husband, “Santa used to fill my stocking with all kinds of things - candy, little stuffed animals, inexpensive jewelry, things like that. It was so much fun to wake up on Christmas morning and see all the surprises!”

“That’s nice,” he said, not looking up from his reading. “We never did anything like that when I was a kid.”

“Then wouldn’t it be fun to do it this year?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said, still not looking up.

So I went out and carefully selected all sorts of goodies to put into his stocking: tiny bottles of after-shave, his favorite candy bars, disposable shavers, a new leather watchband, lottery tickets, etc.

On Christmas morning, however, I was upset to see that my stocking was totally empty, flat as a pancake. As my husband eagerly dug into his, I just had to ask him, “How come you didn’t put anything in my stocking?”

He stopped what he was doing and just stared blankly at me. “Oh, you wanted ME to fill it? Why didn’t you say so? You know how bad I am at taking hints!”

In retrospect, I probably should have sent him over to my friend Nancy’s to take lessons.

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LOVE AND A VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL OF MY READERS!