My 2025 Christmas Gift to Myself (It Ain't a Stocking)

My wife bought me a Christmas stocking with my name embroidered on it this year. She ordered it from Land's End and chose the one with a pile of penguins in the needlepoint design. I like to think that she chose this design because I'm a fan of Linux on both the desktop and the laptop.

But I know she chose the design because one of those penguins is chunky and wearing a red sock cap. The resemblance is not lost on me.

I never had a Christmas stocking growing up, in part because I never had a fireplace, ergo no mantel to hang a stocking from; but I've always wanted to hang stockings, and to stuff those stockings with gifts.

For Christmas 2018, I bought a similar embroidered needlepoint stocking for my wife and another for our little dog, Nena. Nena passed away in January of 2022, not even a month after Christmas, and only a few days from her 19th birthday. But every year, I bring out her stocking when I bring out Linda's, as a way of remembering and celebrating her at this magical and heartbreaking time of year.

And I always notice that my stocking is missing.

Linda and I have had three Christmases without Nena, now. That's three Christmases that we haven't bothered to put up a Christmas tree, even though we have one tucked away in the garage; three Christmases that I've waited to get a fancy full-size stocking of my own to match Linda's and Nena's stockings, because it felt like a gift that would be more meaningful coming from my wife than it would if I bought one for myself.

But this Christmas season, I've given myself a couple of gifts, neither of which are stockings.

These gifts are immaterial, but meaningful in their own right.

You can read about how I'm intent on reclaiming my identity—and an accompanying domain—for this site on my About Me and About This Domain page. If you read that About Me and About This Domain page, you may or may not grok how much of an issue identity has become for me. I'm surprised that it has become more of an issue as I've gotten older. (Maybe I shouldn't be. I lost my mom in my 40s. My biological relatives all appeared in that decade, too. These are things that can play with one's sense of self.) But surprise doesn't change the truth that it has.

After working toward making this site more reflective of how I see myself, I wanted to do something similar on Bluesky.

And on Bluesky, samwoodfin.bsky.social was just as taken as samwoodfin.com is on the internet at large.

I hate having the username smwoodfin everywhere. I really, really do.

And since I couldn't just be samwoodfin on my Bluesky account, I tacked Linda's last name onto mine:

For a multiple reasons I won't list here, when Linda and I got married, we each kept our own names. My new Bluesky username is the first place I've made her surname a part of my own. I asked for her permission and her opinion before I did it, and she seemed happy with the notion.

I'm happy with the notion, too.

She's no longer integrated into just my life, but also—via this digital baby step—into my identity.

Or maybe she always has been, and this is just an acknowledgment of that.

I won't be changing all of my accounts to some version of Woodfin-Mah—unless we decide, at some point, to legally hyphenate—but doing so on even one account was enough to make me feel a stupid giddiness outsized for the action I'd actually taken.

It was also enough to remind me of the gift that I've given myself every year, every Christmas and every birthday since the summer of 2013: the gift of being married to the one person in all the world that I'm absolutely meant to be with.

Linda doesn't have to read this. She knows how much she means to me. And she makes good choices, minus me. (I might be the worst of the bunch!)

But for some few specific people out there (and you, if you think it applies):

I hope you give yourself the gift of permission to make healthy choices. It seems to me that it's often much easier for people—myself included; especially my younger self—to make choices that are ultimately self-destructive than it is to make choices than are positive and healthy. I'm a happy 50-something who's managed to land in what might be her best of all possible places, but I used to make horrible decisions for myself. I'll always regret waiting until I was in my 40s to give myself the agency to make the good choices that got me to this fulfilling place where I now live.

Don't make yourself wait like I did.

Don't even make yourself wait for Christmas. Or Hannukah. Or Kwanzaa. Or the new year, or your next birthday, or that next promotion, or whatever it is that you think will make you ready to be kinder to yourself and to others.

The best time to seize your own agency and make it work for your betterment is now.

And while you're at it, go buy—or make!—a stocking for someone you love.

They've been waiting long enough, too.