It's Christmas Eve, and if your stockings aren't hung by the chimney with care, you'd best get after it. Of course, we have something of an advantage here in our Susitna Valley digs, being only a little over 300 miles from North Pole, so Santa Claus can get to us easily, or he could hit us on the way back home, I suppose. At this latitude, only a few days past the winter solstice, he's got a long, long night to work with.
We don't really have a chimney, though; just a stovepipe. Guess we'll hang our stockings on the Toyo.
Of course, there's always the chance that one has been naughty enough to rate a lump of coal in the old stocking. Which makes one wonder: Why coal? Why not granite, or quartz, or a piece of schist? Well, it turns out there's some interesting history in this.
For coal to become a symbol of mischief and moral failing, it needed far more than chimneys and stockings – it required the scattered customs that had been forming across Europe for centuries, each rooted in feast days, regional superstitions, and the slow accumulation of winter rituals.
Chimneys thought of as passageways between worlds, stockings or shoes set out as vessels for secret gifts, supernatural visitors who watched and judged, punishments that matched the behavior being measured, and specific winter dates tied to saints and local observances – all independent pieces, none of them conceived with coal in mind, yet all of them waiting to be recombined.
As these customs developed on their own trajectories, the question of how a visitor entered the home carried its own deep history, and no boundary in European winter lore was more charged than the hearth.
Life in the pre-industrial age was a lot different from what it is now. A large majority of people worked in agriculture, many at the bare subsistence level. Winters were long and cold, and housing was minimal. Livestock was often kept in the house with the family to add to the warmth, and the hearth was understandably at the center of the daily routine at those times of year when husbands awoke, looked out the window, and said to their wives, "Baby, it's cold outside." So it's perhaps unsurprising that the hearth and chimney were the subject of a lot of tales, including having certain magical beings - like a famous jolly old elf - enter through them.
If the chimney was the entryway, though, it was traditionally shoes and stockings that were the receptacles for gifts brought by those magical beings.
By the 14th century, a Serbian fresco shows the gold descending through a flue, and by the 16th century the Dutch had turned the story into practice: children left their shoes by the hearth on the eve of St. Nicholas, hopeful for small gifts the saint was said to lower down the chimney.
The custom persisted even through the Reformation in parts of the Netherlands, carried later to North America by settlers, though for generations it remained a modest, localized ritual more than a fully formed Christmas tradition.
And the same practices that rewarded could just as easily admonish, turning ritual into a measure of conduct.
Then came the Industrial Revolution, and the widespread use of coal, that curious black rock that burns, for household cooking and heating.
The earliest traces of coal as a Christmas punishment appear only in passing, most notably in William Dean Howells' 1892 story "Christmas Every Day," where stockings are described as "filled with potatoes and pieces of coal wrapped up in tissue paper, just as they always had every Christmas," a detail that suggests coal had become familiar enough to serve as gentle mockery, though not yet the settled symbol of naughtiness it would later become.
In the decades that followed, that symbolism solidified, though the record itself grows obscure. Some accounts point to stories that supposedly made the connection more explicit, and again later as the years went on, yet they remain anecdotal in reference with their sources difficult to pin.
What is certain is that by the 1920s the motif appeared everywhere – in humor magazines, children's books, and newspaper columns – its presence so widespread that coal had effectively entered the cultural lexicon as the settled shorthand for Christmas misbehavior.
So, that's more or less how it happened; how a traditional avenue for mystical beings bearing gifts to the delivery, also, of the anti-gift, the mark of the naughty child, a lump of coal in one's Christmas stocking.
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So, what public figures right now might be receiving a lump of that traditional anti-gift this evening? We could point to the usual suspects; pretty much any Congressional Democrat, and some, like the soon-retiring Democrat Nancy Pelosi (CA-11) or her state's Governor Gavin Newsom, who deserve not only a lump of coal, but an entire railroad hopper car full of the stuff.
But really, that's just low-hanging fruit. And with coal being sorely needed for generating electricity, what modern equivalent would there be? Imagine a naughty child on Christmas morning, complaining about receiving a canister of propane in his or her stocking - or maybe a lump of plutonium, although that last one is taking the idea a bit too far. Naughty kids can learn to be good kids, after all, and making them glow in the dark isn't going to help move them along toward that goal.
As for President Trump, some folks will think he rates a lump of coal - but he's pro-coal, so he may take it as a compliment. And we can be sure that it would be a big, beautiful lump of coal.
Merry Christmas, everyone!
