Purveyors of the Obvious

the mythos of the holiday hobo sack

// December 6th, 2009 // Uncategorized

In early December ’06 I was in a car accident that left my back and right hand a little worse for wear.  I had planned on sewing a holiday stocking for my fiance but physically could not do it.  We had already gone to the fabric store, he picked what we wanted, and it sat folded up, unused.  On Christmas Eve I had the brilliant idea to take a chunky stick from the yard and put his presents on the fabric and tie in on the stick.  It was all I could do with my body post accident.  My fiance, now husband, is an odd duck and absolutely loved it.  He grabbed his hobo sack and took a march with it that night.  At the time we lived in Miami and had a huge garden and yard so would sleep outside under a crab apple tree on Christmas Eve, he had a lot of room to march hobo style.

Thus the mythos of the hobo sack was born.  We began joking that night that our kids would have hobo sacks for the holidays.  We would use it as a teaching tool with them.  We would allow them to pick their stick.  The ideal hobo sack stick.  If you pick a big, sturdy stick it would support a good amount of weight in the sack, but could get too heavy if their march was going to be a long one.  They would lose gifts out of the sack along the journey if it was too heavy until it was ideal weight for a good march.  If they did too small of a stick their hobo sack would have to be tiny and they would not get as many presents.  The feat of selecting the hobo sack stick would be a question of greed vs. comfort vs. sensibility.  We would let our kids pick their stick, put an appropriate collection of presents on the fabric and tie it to the stick, then go for our Christmas Eve or Christmas Day march into nature to open the presents.  The fabricated complexities of the tradition grew with the amount of champagne and orange juice we drank.

In ’07 I made a small stocking for my fiance to hang under the crab apple tree and he acted like he appreciated it.  In ’08 he had become my husband and prior to Christmas admitted he wanted the hobo sack back.  On Christmas day there was a big box for him, with a hobo sack on top of it attached to a stick leaning on the side.

The stick is already selected for this year… but as impeding parents we are facing more of a quandry with if we are going to celebrate a sham of Christmas for a non-Christian and a non-practicing Christian and what to do for our kids in the future.  If we do any Christmas stuff there will be hobo sacks involved and we will have kids growing up thinking this is typical holiday tradition.