Hung up by the chimney with care
‘The stocking emerged alongside the commercialisation of Christmas’
AS I lay in the dark, I became aware of a strong smell of oranges,’ remembered the narrator of Lady Mary Clive’s account of an Edwardian Christmas, , of waking on Christmas morning. ‘I wondered where the smell was coming from and then, with a start, I asked myself, could it be coming from my stocking?’ Cold, but excited, Evelyn ‘crawled to the end of [her] bed and [her] hand met something that was woolly, hard and sharp’. Like generations of children, she concluded that ‘nothing else in the world feels quite like a well-stuffed
