Hung up by the chimney with care

Children around the land will soon awake in the darkness of early morning, straining their eyes to make out the shape of a now-bulging Christmas stocking-but when did we start filling socks with satsumas, sixpences and tin whistles.

- Matthew Dennison

ASI 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, Christmas with the Savages, 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 stocking.

Up and down the country, children will wake on Christmas morning to seize the familiar bulkiness of the Christmas stocking on the end of their bed or hasten through a still-dark house to find them hanging from the chimneypiece in sitting room or drawing room. For at least two centuries, small presents have been mysteriously delivered to eager hands in the stretchy, sometimes scratchy, wrapping of a knitted woollen stocking. In heel or toe will be a bright, waxy citrus fruit: an orange, satsuma, tangerine or clementine. A century after Lady Mary's childhood, their distinctive sharp-sweet scent remains as redolent of Christmas as that of mince pies, clove spiced mulled wine or a steaming roast bird.