“I promised them that we would find a way to make them feel loved again,’’ says Kiefer, who now lives in Wayland with her husband Sam and their daughters, McKenna, 17; Madison, 15; Emma, 14; and Rosie, 10.
It was that long-ago promise - and a family crisis - that recently led Kiefer to write a holiday tale for children about the misfit socks, with a message of celebrating the differences among us.
That earlier Christmas season, Kiefer dumped all the odd socks on the dining room table, and put out glitter, felt, beads, pipe cleaners, and jingle bells. She had a supply of “gratitude goodies’’ to fill the stockings: oatmeal and carrots for the reindeer and candy and nuts for the humans.
Early on that Christmas Eve morning, the family donned elf hats and with ribbons they tied the filled socks onto the doorknobs of neighbors, with a poem explaining the old socks’ new purpose. “I really do believe that Advent, and Christmas, is a time of transformation, something old into something new, something lost into something found. You really do go from misfit to magnificent,’’ says Kiefer.
When they moved to Wayland in 2000, they continued the tradition. “It was so cool,’’ says McKenna, now 17. “As Christmas approached, we knew we got to make these socks. We totally got into it.’’
Once the neighborhood was taken care of, they began taking the project into the girls’ classrooms so that the students could do a sock of their own. The misfit sock tradition lasted until Christmas 2008. Then a family crisis resulted in the death of the project - the same family crisis that recently revived it.
That winter, McKenna, who had just turned 14, fell ill with head and stomach aches, fatigue and chronic pain. Pale and scrawny, she lost 20 pounds, dropping to 79. Extensive tests were negative; she was in and out of hospitals and missed much of school that year.
