How posh is your Christmas stocking?

A shooting sock

This is dead posh. When I was small, my siblings and I all went to bed on Christmas Eve and solemnly draped one of our father’s enormous shooting socks over the end of our duvets.

These were vast, woollen socks, made to stretch over the knee, which could — gratifyingly — fit a good number of presents. These included chocolate coins, small trinkets from the toy shop, jokes such as a whoopie cushion and, as we got older, beauty goodies from Boots.

There was slight confusion one year when Father Christmas had too much to drink before doing his rounds and confused my stocking with my brother’s. Easily done after a few whiskies since one shooting sock looks very like another. ‘Poor Father Christmas, it must have been very dark,’ came the excuse in the morning.

A football sock

Technically the right shape, as above, just fractionally less posh.

A pillowcase

Quite oligarch in style because it suggests Father Christmas has delivered so many presents, and potentially quite large presents, that you need something more sack-like than a big sock. It also takes the joy out of ferreting deeper and deeper into a stocking until you get to the tangerine in the toe.

One leg hacked off from an old pair of tights

Not a huge amount of effort has been made here, has it? As a grown-up, you may need therapy.

A monogrammed stocking

You’re probably an influencer and will pose with your partner/children/dog in matching pyjamas on Christmas Day. You’ve kept up Elf on the Shelf all Advent and posted it on Instagram every day. You want everything to be so perfect this year that you’re on the edge of a nervous breakdown and may well file for divorce come January.

A silk stocking

No, no, you’ve got Christmas all wrong.

A flipper

This is extremely ostentatious because it implies that you’re spending Christmas somewhere hot like the Seychelles or Antigua. Or the Maldives, where my siblings and I left out our flippers in lieu of stockings one year. Immensely spoiled, I know, but in my defence it was the first post-separation Christmas where my father had us without Mum, so he decided on an expensive distraction technique. It worked, too, because I spent a lot of time that holiday worrying about how Father Christmas was going to fit all my presents into a flipper. Fortunately, he made it work by having the presents spill out of them. Clever old stick, isn’t he?