Anatomy of a Stocking

The perfect stocking is like a cake. In isolation, each individual ingredient can be pleasant, but eating straight icing will make you sick and eating plain cake will leave you bored. If you’re playing Santa, or putting together some similar combination of small items like gift bags for an event, these three components are essential to baking up the ideal stocking cake:

Something to eat. This is the flavoring of the cake we’re baking. Traditionally this Christmas-stocking role is filled by a candy cane or an orange, but anything small, tasty, and appropriate to the recipient will do. The key thing is that it’s indulgent enough that the recipient will want to gobble it down right away, but little enough that there’s no guilt attached to doing so.

Something to play with. This is the icing on the cake. Toys, pocket games, carnival novelties, ornaments, buttons with humorous mottoes: keep it fun and useless, just a light, frothy topping.

Something useful. This is the batter of the cake, the ingredients that give it substance and bind it all together. Everybody needs pens, notepads, mints, little packets of Kleenex - and, nowadays, a way to get the smudges and smears off of their phone screens.

These Monster CleanTouch kits hold no surprises. The non-alcohol, ammonia-free spray and the 6" x 6" microfiber cloth just do what they’re supposed to. The spray bottle, according to one Amazon reviewer, is about the size of a credit card and the thickness of three credit cards - stocking-stuffer size, in other words. You probably wouldn’t think to go out and look for this at the store, but once you have it handy, you’ll be glad you do. That makes it the perfect batter for our stocking “cake”.

(Note: do not make actual cake batter with this fluid. Eating it will mess you up bad.)

And you get three of these little kits for eight bucks, covering the “useful” requirement for three stockings. Buy these and pat yourself on the back for knocking out a Christmas-shopping chore so early. Why not treat yourself to a little reward? For some reason, cake sounds really good right now.