Hanging Our Stories by the Chimney With Care

The mantel over our fireplace already is festooned with the usual assortment of socks in various stages of fray.

No mere Christmas stockings, these footsies. They're more like windsocks of change.

We are that sometimes-maligned, endlessly examined and irreversibly entrenched part of the American landscape that the chronically upbeat insist on calling the blended family.

Don't you love that euphony? As if all it takes to reconfigure a family is to throw everyone into the Cuisinart and press "puree."

Our family is not so much blended as tossed. We're a big ol' bowl of fixins, an ingenuity born of good intentions and a cluttered pantry.

Sometimes, flavors compete. Other times, we are the perfect fusion, aided by a well-timed spritz of balsamic banter. This is particularly true whenever our four grown children decide to band together and gang up on the parents, who fell in love past an age deemed appropriate for romance or frivolity.

"Ingrates," my husband always says, his face in perpetual grin. "Every last one of them."

Twelve stockings dangle over our hearth, and no more than two of any kind match. They are various sizes and motifs, but they are all a version of red. In our home, that qualifies as a theme.

There's considerable strategy to their arrangement. If I stick blood relatives together, it looks like a lineup of mob families, a Christmas Cosa Nostra. So I split up everyone. Stepsiblings mingle, in-laws interlope, and every so often, one of the pets' homemade face-o'-felts smiles, reminding me of the days when they broadened both the definition and the size of the family.

My husband's stocking hangs on the far left, and it is the oldest. Vintage 1952. An emaciated deer leaps over a ribbon of his name. A straight pin holds up the letter Y in MERRY, and there it shall stay. Every time I look at it, I imagine the nimble fingers of his devoted mother sliding it into place.

I'm on the far right. (Really, just this once.) My stocking is larger than my husband's, and it has bells.

I made it in high school with Mom's blessing after my hopeful father bought a sewing machine so that she could repair his clothes. Apparently unmoved by his grand scheme for her self-improvement, she immediately sewed two of his pants pockets together. An accident, of course.

"Somebody should get some use out of this thing," she said, pointing to the offending technology. So I made stockings for me, my sisters and my brother big enough to hold small appliances. (All these years later, dear siblings, and I'm still waiting for the love.)

The stockings in our home are snapshots of our personal histories. Like all histories, they are complicated, sometimes stitched in code.

My stepdaughters' stockings are the simplest. Their names flow in silver script from a paternal grandmother's hand, her assurance that Santa would find them no matter where they visited.

The round-faced angel on my son's stocking depicts not a baby, but the 7-year-old he was when I first met him. His sister gets little mileage from ridiculing his cowlick and freckles. He can remember the day she was born. Her angel was bald, bald, bald for years, he reminds her. When she pitched a fit in second grade, I stitched on the helmet hair.

So many little stories tucked behind globs of glue and glitter. The narrative is interrupted sometimes, but the tapestry is there. And now there is another thread to pull.

A grandbaby is on the way.

I'm cross-stitching bibs, sorting through our children's books and designing a needlepoint that reads, "What Happens at Grandma's, Stays at Grandma's."

But I'm also sorting through my stockpile of felt and floss, hoping to deign by intuition what I know only time can tell. Some things you can't rush. The stocking will have to wait.

I've got to lay eyes on this little one. I want those tiny fingers to wrap around one of mine and feel what breeze kicks up.

Then, and only then, can we hang the next windsock.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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