Homeless Stockings

S and I moved into this house almost 6 years ago.  It was February, I was pregnant with Z and our favorite room was the family room with it's vaulted ceilings and floor to ceiling brick fireplace.  The one thing the room lacked was a mantle and I asked S the first month we moved in to please install one.  Other things took up our time (removing wallpaper, rotted master bedroom deck, the birth of our first child etc.) and the mantle never came to be.  I was determined to have a mantle to decorate and hang our stockings from for our first Christmas in the house and so in early November, I ordered an unfinished mantle from Lowes.  S picked it up, stained it and had it up by Thanksgiving...my HERO!

The stockings were handmade out of felt and fashioned after the ones my mother made for all of us (pictured below).  They looked so nice hanging by the fireplace and I hoped they would mean as much to our children as the ones my mom made for us did.

This year we installed the pellet stove insert and I couldn't wait to spend Christmas morning in front of the warm cozy fire.  S and I talked about not using the stove on Christmas Eve night so we would not cook Santa could hang the stockings for Santa and not have a fire on our hands ;)  Unfortunately they would have to be boxed until then but I wanted to see how wonderful they would look next to the new stove.  Never did I imagine that they would be too long.  Two stockings fit on either side of the stove but that left two stockings homeless....what to do??

I looked into buying shorter stockings but money is not available right now for such things and besides I LOVED my stockings.  I could shorten my handmade stockings but they are already so skinny that I was afraid that they wouldn't hold much at all.  Then it hit me in the middle of the night (maybe the work of some angels in Heaven)....hang the stockings on the railings of the stairwell.  This is what we did as children until we moved to a house with a mantle and this is also what is done at S's parents house.  So off to Michael's we went with our coupon to buy green garland for the railings.  We also bought some silver ribbon to tie them.  Five dollars later and we had a wonderful solution that we are all very happy with!  I also hung some photo ornaments I made around the stockings (found the idea on pinterest) but more on that later :)

Where are your stockings hung???