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When I was a kid, my mother made my sisters and I homemade Christmas stockings. Every December, these craft-tastic masterpieces still assume their positions of honor on the banister of my parents’ staircase, where their multitude of hand-sewed sequins shimmer, palpably emanating peace and joy and all those other elements of the Christmas spirit that aren’t usually my parents’ speed.

It’s obvious that my father conceptually engineered the stockings: his unique design sensibilities are writ large. Instead of adhering to the conventional sock silhouette, the felt of our stockings are cut in the shape of a chunky-heeled boot: Each one is personalized with our names, spelled out in my father’s trademark, much-lauded swirly letters. But it’s in the decorative detail that you see my mother’s hand and the painstaking hours she devoted to the project: underneath each name, an all-felt Christmas scene is affixed – a tall fir tree laden with balls and candy canes and tinsel, surrounded by all manner of Rockwell-era Christmas toys like rocking horses and tricycles, teddy bears and baby dolls. The whole lot of it is slathered in sequins, each one sewed on by hand.

What makes the stockings so impressive, and precious, is that my mother is not a naturally crafty person (at least not in the arts-and-crafts sense): she doesn’t knit or paint or do origami or even arrange flowers in a pleasing way. So, the stockings were clearly a labor of love. I can just see her in bell bottoms and a bowl cut, so overcome by affection for her tiny, tow-headed kids, so driven by a desire to bind us together in tradition, that she unearthed her old Home Ec sewing basket and set about making Christmas history.

Now, fast forward a few decades and you’ll find my own kids celebrating Christmas with stockings I purchased at the 99 cent store. While generic, these velour, furry-cuffed stockings did the job of holding loot quite nicely and there were never any complaints. But last year, when my husband David and I unpacked the Christmas stuff, the stockings had gone missing and it occurred to me that instead of replacing crap with more crap, I could give the gift that lasts a lifetime. I could fashion homemade stockings for the children. If my mother could do it, then certainly, so could I. Better, probably. Mainly, of course, my stockings would be in honor of my mother, an homage to her initial creation, but if they just so happened to surpass hers in creativity, devotion and skill, well, there was nothing I could do about it. Once I realized I could compete with my mother’s accomplishment, it was a done deal. I bought a tonnage of felt and sequins and got to work.

“Children, I have an announcement!” I exclaimed the day before Christmas Eve, “I am making you homemade, personalized Christmas stockings! Just like the ones Nana made for me!”

My six year-old son, known in these parts as Primo, made a vague grunting noise to indicate he’d heard me. His four year-old sister, Seconda, was too busy jamming Play Doh in the bottom of Legos to reply.

“They will be one-of-a-kind!” I gushed, “Irreplaceable! You will keep them your whole lives and hand them down to your children!”

Nothing.

“Isn’t that wonderful??” I pressed, through slightly gritted teeth.

“Oh. Great. Thanks.” replied Primo flatly, not even looking up from the Legos.

After working until midnight that night, I had cut the felt for both stockings, the letters for Seconda’s name and the shape of the evergreen trees that would serve as the centerpiece for the heartwarming Christmas scene on the front. This took me about five hours, and I hadn’t even threaded a needle yet. I realized that to meet my goal — attaching faux-fur trim, affixing the kids’ names, trimmed trees. loads of presents under the trees AND (the tiebreaker) a simple night-scape of shooting stars, moons and candy canes — I’d probably have to work from that moment until New Year’s. There was no way I’d be done in time for Santa.

So on Christmas Eve, I brought the work-sack full of felt to my parent’s place and basically turned the apartment into a Stocking-Manufacturing Sweat Shop. While my mother and father cooked, I barked orders at the rest of the crew – my sister was appointed head of Cutting, David was Official Threader, my cousins were freelance seamstresses. All of these laborers were as unskilled as I was however and it was a real case of the blind leading the blind: stitches dropped, wrinkled felt, crooked names and just sloppy craftsmanship in general. But when my grandmother finally got sprung from her duties preparing the Christmas lasagna, I roped her into the operation and the whole sewing machine kicked into turbo drive.

Nonnie worked as a seamstress in swimsuit factories for nigh on forty years and she knows her way around a needle and thread. The woman is a professional.

“So I want to put sequins on the perimeter of the tree,” I started telling her.

“Ok ok ok,” she interrupted, “I know wat you talkin’ about.”

She slipped on her reading glasses, positioned the thimble in place and what followed can only be described as a Christmas miracle. In the time it took me to knot the end of the thread, she’d already sewed on five letters. I am not exaggerating. It was like having a contest between sometime who was sewing with their fingers and someone who was sewing with their toes.

You know how, when you’re little, you believe that a few elves in Santa’s workshop make all the toys for all the kids in the world, and it’s a plausible scenario because the elves are magical? Well, if those elves have skills like my grandmother, I totally buy it again. Watching Nonnie dart the needle in and out of the felt, through sequins, over fur, her hands a pale blur, I believed.

And that’s when I revisited the 1970s scene of my mother making stockings for my sisters and I. All these years, I’d envisioned her doing it all by herself, sitting cross-legged in a polyester pantsuit. But now I’d discovered her secret weapon: her mother. I’m sure my mother started the project and oversaw the operation, but there was no doubt in my mind that Nonnie, stocking elf, had finished the job. It takes a village to raise a child, but to make their homemade Christmas stockings, all it takes is one super-skilled great-grandmother.

By the time I went back to my apartment on Christmas Eve, I had just a few finishing touches to add before sewing the stockings closed. Of course, these finishing touches took me four hours. I collapsed in a heap at 2am, having hung the finished stockings on the doorknob of the kids’ bedroom, where they glittered gleefully, catching the light from the Christmas tree. You could hear them singing the words “Labor of love!” to the tune of Silent Night. I felt magnificent.

The next morning when the kids woke at the crack of dawn, all bushy-tailed to see Santa’s offerings, I was significantly less magnificent. It took a preternatural amount of self control not to scream stuff like “WHO IS GOING TO CLEAN UP ALL THIS DAMN WRAPPING PAPER, HUH?” as they tore their presents open. But as an antidote to crankiness, I just looked at my kids’ twinkling eyes, all aglow with the magic of Christmas — and when that wore off, I gazed lovingly at my other masterful creations – so much less loud and demanding. There the stockings hung, the white fur so puffy and inviting, the felt trees so symmetrical, the adorable presents lined up in adorable rows underneath.

These stockings would outlast me, serving as a reminder to my children of my love for them, a love so great it caused me to overcome incompetence, laziness and a natural aversion to needles. Sure, my children didn’t appreciate them in the slightest now, but one day, when they had kids of their own, they’d smooth down the distressed edges of the felt trees I’d pricked my fingertips sewing on, and they’d say to themselves – or, dare I dream?, out loud – “You are a great mother, maybe even the best that ever lived.” Then they’d think, “And if she could do it, so could I. Better, probably.” And so, a legacy continues.

To read more of Nicole’s adventures in Mommyland, tune in to her blog, A Mom Amok, amomamok.blogspot.com.

My son was born on Thanksgiving, which meant that he was a newborn in the coldest weather New York has to offer. This concerned me. Since I was the first of my friends to have a baby, my go-to resource for parenting guidance was my grandmother and she has a thing about children and cold. Specifically, drafts.

I thought this obsession was unique to my grandmother until I stayed with some of her relatives one summer in Italy, and every evening at dusk, they’d patrol the house, slamming windows shut against the summer breeze. They had no air conditioning, incidentally. Once the perimeter had been secured and all chance of relief from heat eradicated, the Italians could relax. That’s when I started worrying that we’d asphyxiate in our sleep.

Obviously, my grandmother’s people in the Old Country are mad as hatters, and for all I know, they’re still using leeches to treat a fever. Me, I’m no hard-core crazy, I’m just highly susceptible to Mommy Guilt and I’ve got a grandmother who knows how to lay it on.

At the inaugural meeting of my new moms’ group, I showed up looking like an Arctic explorer and wowed the crowd by removing layer after layer of clothing from my infant son for a good ten minutes. It took a helluva lot of acerbic wit to convince the moms that I was cool despite my octogenarian tendencies.
Over the years, thanks to the counter influence of these mom friends, my views on most parenting issues have become more modern. But when it comes to dressing kids for the cold, I can’t shake the draft fixation. It’s a powerful and persistent pocket of insanity.

Luckily my son, known in these parts as Primo, couldn’t care less how many layers I toss at him. The kid, now 6, starts wearing long johns in November and doesn’t take them off ‘til we see butterflies in the spring. He’s also has the croup half a dozen times, scarlet fever, rotavirus and roseola. So you see how well that worked out.

My four year-old daughter, however, presents some stumbling blocks. Seconda, who makes it exceedingly clear that she is second only in birth order, is not terribly compliant to begin with, and especially not when clothes are concerned. I say “clothes” but I really mean “costumes,” because Sec doesn’t so much get dressed as dressed up.

As a rule, I happily hand over all creative control of Seconda’s ensembles to Sec herself. My mother exercised an aggressive veto power over my outfits – “That clashes!” “You’re mixing prints!” “You look like a hobo!” – and because I am still scarred from her scathing Project-Runway-type critique, I resolved to let Seconda, for now, wear whatever the hell she wants, as long as it doesn’t harm her or others. The problem is, she doesn’t usually know what she wants until she’s pulled half her clothes out of the drawers and had a full-fledged diva fit. Consequently, her morning wardrobe selection is a messy, maddening time-consuming process which most people would have to take a benzo to get through. It’s like the Devil Wears Prada every morning in our apartment.

“This has a zipper and I DON’T LIKE ZIPPERS!”

“No, no no, green is the worst!”

“Too tight!”

“Too loose!”

“I want it to come ALL the way down to the FLOOR!”

“Cinderella would never wear this!”

“Get this dreadful thing off of me! I LOOK LIKE A BOY!”

Once the temperature drops in the fall, the war zone of her closet becomes even more treacherous because if there is one thing you can rely on with Sec’s wardrobe choices, it is that she never, ever, wears anything weather-appropriate.

Our lowest point was the day in November she woke up and asked for her tortellini. I told her we didn’t have time to make tortellini for breakfast.

“Not to eat,” she sighed, “To wear.”

After years of practice, I’ve learned that the first step in troubleshooting these kinds of misunderstandings is: Caffinate.

“You want to wear tortellini?” I asked, sipping from my mug, “The pasta?”

“Not the pasta!” she exclaimed, “The kind of tortellini a mermaid wears!”

Clearly, this was a job too big for coffee. These are the moments when I wish I could appeal to my kid’s rationality and just say, “Honey, you know I love it when you get all creative, but can we put a pin in this? Save the loco for later?”

Regrettably, children never want to save the loco for later. They always want the loco now.

“Do you mean a tail?” I inquired.

“You’re not LISTENING to me!” she cried, “I said, TOR.TELL.LINI. What you wear on top of the tail.”

Instantly, the image of tri-colored tortellini strung on a piece of fishwire and tied around the neck of a green-haired sea-woman popped into my mind. But where had Seconda got this hare-brained idea? That was weird, and kind of unhygienic, even for Montessori. Also, I didn’t think I could whip it up in fifteen minutes . . .  unless I didn’t cook the tortellini and just strung them frozen. That could work.

Thankfully, Seconda spared me by offering some helpful information.

“I wore it yesterday!” she cried, “My pink tortellini! Did you wash it?”

I beelined to the hamper and began flinging dirty laundry into the hallway, in search of pink.

“NOT THAT!” Seconda shrieked when I held up pink tulle skirts and pink striped dresses, “THE TORTELLINI! WHY WON”T YOU GIVE MY ——–”

Then, suddenly, Sec emitted a shriek of delight: “THERE it is!” she exclaimed, running over to the pile of dirty clothes and tugging on a fuchsia string that poked out of the top. She stood, grinning, a pink string bikini clasped to her heart.

“Ahhhh,” I murmured, “A bikini.”

I was flooded with relief that now, we might be only minorly late, and that I would not have to improvise jewelry out of stuffed pasta. Then I realized Seconda was stripping down and putting on the pink string bikini.

“Honey, you can’t wear that to school,” I started, gingerly.

“Don’t worry, don’t worry, its OK,” she assured me.

Instantly, I regretted not tossing the infernal bikini in the trash when I found it in a bag of hand-me-downs. Sec’s wardrobe is pretty hand-me-down heavy, which is part of what makes it so great for costuming, with all sorts of crazy, wonderful items – crushed velvet jumpers and straw hats and dresses featuring actual bells and whistles — thrown in. But you do find some head-scratchers, and when I saw that pink string bikini, I thought “For a four year old? Is that strictly necessary?”

However, since I am a borderline hoarder, I did not toss the bikini. And now I was sorry.

“It’s too cold outside,” I explained, “Much too cold.”

“I’m not cold,” she insisted.

“You will be,” I insisted back.

“I won’t, I promise!”

I would like to be able to shrug my shoulders, as other parents do, and say, “All right. It’s your choice. I’ll have your jacket if you get cold.” I’ve seen children in the dead of winter on the playground who’ve opted to shed their outerwear and experiment with frostbite, and whose parents stand on the sidelines, holding the jacket patiently, allowing their children to learn from their own mistakes. I get it and hey, I can get libertarian, too: I give Sec license to walk around barefoot on the playground and cover her hair in dirt from next to a tree that dogs use as a bathroom. But I have zero flexibility when it comes to bundling. That morning, I explained why to my daughter:

“If you wear that bikini to school, you will get very, very cold and if you get very, very cold, you may get sick, and if you get sick, who will be the one up all night, taking your temperature and wondering if we should go to the emergency room and having an ulcer? ME. And I don’t like doing that. So it’s out of the question.”

She screwed her face up so that all the features squished together in the middle. That’s her I-am-royally-pissed look.

“HOWEVER—” I went on, “if you want to wear it under your regular clothes, you totally can. No problem.”

“But then you won’t be able to see it!” she pouted.

Then her face lit up, a real Eureka moment and she shrieked: “Wait a second! Wait A SECOND! I have a great idea! What if I wear it ON TOP of my clothes?”
Was it the arrangement I would have chosen? No. Was I totally comfortable when Sec took off her down jacket and revealed to her preschool class that she was wearing a miniscule pink bikini bottom over polka dot leggings, and a skimpy bikini top over her sateen poodle pajama shirt? Not really. Did I feel a twinge of regret when I realized she’d be sporting the bikini-on-top outfit for the next 7-10 days, including at birthday parties and bedtime? Sure I did.
But I will tell you one thing: my daughter didn’t catch a single chill in that get-up. That outfit provided one hundred percent draft protection. And I, for one, will always feel a peculiar affection for tortellini.

For more of Nicole’s adventures in Mommyville, visit her blog, A Mom Amok, at amomamok.blogspot.com.