Stocking.

I've just finished sorting out my Christmas stocking.

Yes, in March.

See, my family has this weird tradition with Christmas "stockings" -- we don't have the normal stocking, you see, but a bag of loot the size of a pillowcase, filled with trinkets and ephemera. Everything from candy (always welcome) and gift certificates down to, well, bars of hotel soap and individual soy sauce packets. Going through it all is a daunting task and isn't terribly rewarding. No one in my immediate family seems to still enjoy this tradition -- except my mother. And since she does, we keep doing it.

(Actually, I suppose my sister still gets some enjoyment out of it, in a perverse game of escalation and retaliation. Similarly, my father has admitted to taking the items he received in the previous year's stocking and distributing them to everyone else's stocking.)

So I finally sat down with the most recent stocking this morning and sorted everything out into three piles: Things I Kinda Want, Things That Might Possibly Be Useful to Someone Else (i.e., the charity pile), and Things That Are of No Conceivable Use to Anyone. Guess which pile was the largest?

At least it's out of my way, now. But I'd feel more of a sense of accomplishment from getting this done if I didn't know that there were still bags filled with previous years' stocking contents lurking in my closet somewhere, like unexploded mines.