I’m a little late, but one of my favorite things over the holidays was reading about people’s Christmas traditions (Stacey’s family pajamas are one of the highlights every year).  As such, I’d like to share one of ours.  I think I’ve talked about this in the past, but this year was my first year to be an active participant in our tradition of knit stockings.  My mom’s first knitting project was an intarsia Christmas stocking.  She had no idea that it was a difficult project.  Since, she has knit stockings for every member of our family, immediate and extended…us, my cousins, and, as we’ve gotten older, our spouses and kids.  Her motivation in teaching me to knit five years ago was so I could help carry on the tradition.  I started by making T-Bone a stocking several years ago.  This year, Mom had 4 stockings to make, with one new spouse and three babies born this year, so I helped out.  I made one for my cousin’s son (which I failed to photograph, of course) and one for Cameron. 

The stockings are my favorite part of Christmas, not only because it’s fun to see them again every year, but also because you can stuff a lot of stuff in a knit stocking (plus we usually go overboard and have a separate bag of treats in addition to the stocking).  Our stockings have the best stuff in them…bath stuff, our ornament for the year, candy, and this year a fun cookie spoon and a reed diffuser that is making my bathroom smell wonderfully as we speak.  So, stockings are my favorite Christmas tradition.  I finished Cam’s just in time…here they all are stuffed and under the tree.  It appears we have a bit of a snowman theme for the human members of our household (but don’t tell T-Bone he’s not human, he’d be devastated).

So for the specs, we use the Mary Maxim stocking books for the basic pattern.  We ran out of snowmen in those books, so I used some knitter’s graph paper and merged two cross stitch patterns that I liked to design the snowman.  For the yarn, good old red heart!  See, it’s good for something!  I’m not a huge fan of intarsia (doing it anyway, I love how it looks in the stockings), but I’ll keep doing it to carry on the tradition.