This year Susanna Leonard Hill’s Annual Holiday Writing Contest featured bad guys. The challenge was to create a new holiday bad guy and feature them in a kid-friendly story of 250 words or less. I was delighted to learn that my Indomitable Sock Monster (the lesser-known cousin of the Abominable Snowman) received an honorable mention!
Read on and you’ll find out where all those misplaced socks actually go …
The Stockings Were Hung by the Chimney with Care
By: Katie McEnaney
Long before washers, long before dryers,
Before electric lights and gas-only fires,
There lived a monster.
His quest? To steal one sock from every pair ever knit.
No matching sock in your drawer? Indomitable Sock Monster.
An odd number of socks left hanging to dry? Indomitable Sock Monster.
What could be done to stop his sock-stealing rampage? The townspeople were at a loss.
But clever Siobhan had a plan. She knitted the largest, longest, most colorful pair of socks ever seen. Irresistible.
Siobhan nailed them up near the chimney and tied the loose end of the yarn tightly to the nail.
That morning, one sock had been stolen! But it left a trail of yarn behind as it unraveled. Siobhan raced out the door to follow the yarn … it wound around town, across the meadow, and up the hill to the abandoned castle.
There she spied the monster:
his terrible teeth …
his horrifying horns …
his mouse-mittens and squirrel-sized scarves …
Wait, what?
The monster was turning stolen socks into gifts for the Winter Solstice?
The town came together and declared a truce. Every Solstice townspeople hung their largest unmatched sock above the fireplace for the Indomitable Sock Monster. He stole his fill of socks on that night only, leaving the remaining pairs intact for another year.
Everything worked out perfectly until a jolly old man started interfering and using those single socks for his own purposes …
but that’s another story.