Stockings

Planning stockings and secret santa without buying junk

A ten dollar cap and eleven people is a logistics problem, not a shopping problem. How to solve it in one order, and when to place it.

Every December the same thing happens. Somebody organises the office draw, the cap is set at ten or fifteen dollars, and everyone spends three weeks buying something with the specification cheap, present-shaped, and not embarrassing. Socks win that brief because they are the only cheap gift that reliably gets used.

The same logic applies to stockings. A rolled pair takes almost no space, sits well at the toe of the stocking, and is the item that survives past January while the novelty pen does not.

Buy in October

This is the single most useful thing in this guide. Holiday designs sell through in the two weeks before the holiday and then stay gone until the following year. The catalog does not restock quickly, and a design that is showing in stock in October is frequently unavailable by the tenth of December.

The corollary: if you are reading this after the first week of December and a specific pair is still listed, buy it now rather than adding it to a list.

One order, many people

The efficient version is a single order covering the whole group, which means one delivery to track instead of nine. That works if you accept a constraint: pick designs from the same section so the sizes and construction are consistent, then vary the artwork per person.

Sizes are the part that catches people out. Buying for a whole team means guessing eight foot sizes. Pairs in the men US 6 to 13 range cover most adults and stretch down more gracefully than up, which is why they are the default for a group order.

Filling a stocking properly

• One pair per stocking is right, two is generous, three reads as filler
• Roll rather than fold, since a rolled pair holds its shape and shows the print at the top
• Keep the boxed pairs for the people who will open them at a table, since the box is half the presentation
• Put the sock in last so it sits at the top where it gets seen first

The gift that goes on top

The other role these play is as the small thing taped to the big present. It gets opened first, it produces a reaction, and it stops the main gift arriving into silence. For that job the loudest design wins, since it only has to work for eight seconds.

What to skip

Multipacks of five different designs are cheaper per pair and worse as gifts, because a set of five gives one person all five and they will like two of them. Buy individual boxed pairs for people and save the multipacks for your own drawer.

Age-specific and year-specific designs are also poor stocking material. They are single-use by construction and they end up in a drawer in January, which defeats the one advantage socks have over the rest of the cheap gift aisle.