When I was a kid, instead of the “stockings hung by the chimney with care,” red and iconically giant sock-shaped, trimmed with fur and bedecked, perhaps, with initials or names, we had Mountie’s socks. Apparently, my mother knew a Mountie and somehow got ahold of his socks. It has only recently occurred to me that my mother may have been in a relationship with the Mountie, but … however it came to pass, my two brothers and I each had a large, long, and very itchy, black, woollen sock, which was draped across the end of our beds on the night of Christmas eve.