In our family, the adult children (my two brothers and I) give our parents stockings every Christmas morning. Every year when we were children, my brothers and I would bounce out of bed and open our stockings to pass the time while waiting for other relatives to arrive. One year when my brother and I were teenagers, we began to realize that Christmas wasn’t just about ourselves. We decided our parents should have something to look forward to every Christmas morning. From that point on, we made sure our parents had stockings on Christmas morning. There are no rules to filling their stockings. Practical, absurd and everything in between is fair game for stockings. The only rule is that it doesn’t matter where they are or who they are with, our parents have stockings on Christmas morning. The joy is not in watching them open them, it is in knowing that they get to experience what they made sure we experienced our entire childhoods.