One of the most joyous parts of Christmas morning, or Christmas Eve, for many people is the opening of their stockings. Filling stockings with gifts and hanging them above or near the fireplace is one of the oldest Christmas gift giving traditions. Children especially love seeing their stocking growing fuller by the day during the weeks leading up to Christmas Eve or Day.

But, there's a bugbear in all of this stocking filling: What to fill them with? It used to be tradition to fill the stockings with edible things, like top of the line chocolates or the hard-to-get-in-Winter oranges. But these things, while still great, are now rather easy to acquire. So, it has become more of a challenge to keep stocking filler gifts magical.

So, in addition to dropping in tasty edible goodies, one way to find things to fill stockings with is to buy all sorts of little things that your recipients use all the time but never think of buying until they lose them or run out of them. So this list of items might include hair combs and brushes, batteries for gadgets, shaving cream and razors or replacement blades, pairs of socks, scent (cologne or perfume), hair clips or ties, a nice pair of scissors, a new flashlight, a pair of gloves...you can see where the list of this sort of thing can go on and on. People really appreciate receiving this sort of mundane items; it saves them trips to the store later on in the year, provides them with useful things that they might have overlooked, and lets them have things on hand for when they lose them or run out of them (which of course always has to happen when they are needed most).

Yet another idea is to fill their stockings with small novelty items. These might include inexpensive lottery tickets, special Christmas collectibles, an addition to a set of collectible nick-knacks that you know the person avidly gathers some kind of clever and nicely made toy such as a Russian doll, something from a hobby shop, and any number of things you might stumble upon while not even looking for such things.

Then, you can get very clever yourself and try to find some really "out there" gifts to fill a stocking with. In this day and age all kinds of things like that are all over the place on the Internet. These might include things like the Sat Nag (a compass that will never, ever get you where you want to go); a digital luggage scale to save people buckets of money when they travel; rhythm sticks (for all of the air drummers out there); the Chain Wine Bottle Holder (a marvellous feat of engineering that has to be seen in action to be believed); the USB Chameleon (USB-powered, you can just pop him on your computer monitor)...Just get on the Internet and use your imagination.