General Information about Item:

• Material Lore
• Language: English
• State of Origin: California, USA
• Informant: T.M.
• Date Collected: Nov. 5, 2021

Informant Data:

T.M. is a Dartmouth Student in the class of 2024. He was born and raised just outside of Los Angeles, California, and has lived there his whole life until coming to Dartmouth. He and his family love the holidays and have many family traditions to bring the family together. 

Contextual Data:

Cultural Context: The informant is American and not religious. While this may seem confusing, as Christmas is a Christian holiday, American Christmas traditions are often only loosely related to its original religious roots. Gifts, the purchasing, wrapping and giving of them, is a very important part of an American Christmas. The presentation of these gifts are equally as important to uphold other Christmas lore, such as the belief in Santa Claus. 

Social Context: This folklore was collected in a planned interview, the informant knew the subject was going to be on Christmas beforehand. Before I decided I wanted to focus on gifts, I asked a wide variety of questions and decided the relevant bit of folklore was the use of stockings. The folklore was originally learned when the informant was a child, and since the practice stockings has been in the family for awhile, the first family member to use them is unknown. The social function of stockings, and the gifts that come inside them, for this informant is primarily humour.

Item:

Although the interview covered much more than just stockings, I will only focus on this one item for this post because many of the things mentioned were lovely family traditions, but I couldn’t make a strong case for them being ‘folklore’. Stockings are large sock-shaped bags in which smaller presents are placed into. The original inventor or location is unknown, but many families across America use stockings for storing gifts in addition to putting gifts under the tree. While gifts under the tree may be more ‘intimate’ and a lot of thought goes into them, gifts in stockings tend to be more light-hearted, and in this case, humorous. 

Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):

Transcript:

Please listen to the audio recording for more detail, but here is a relevant paraphrasing about stockings:

“Stocking gifts are usually smaller and more funny than intimate…there’s usually some sort of nude calendar for some member of the family”

Collector’s Comments:

I’m not American, but I also use stockings with my family, although our stocking gifts aren’t humorous. They are more trinket-like, for instance I used to get little candies or fun-shaped erasers. I think stockings count as material lore because they are “things people make with their hands” (Wilson) for a specific occasion, for entertainment. Although they aren’t commonly made by hand anymore, they still exist as a folkloric relic of that era. 

Collector’s Name: Julia Cross

Dartmouth College

RUSS13

Fall 2021