When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?

Chesterton contrasts a child’s spontaneous gratitude for small, seasonal gifts with an adult’s tendency to overlook the far greater “given-ness” of ordinary life. The joke hinges on a reversal: stockings are not merely containers for presents; they are themselves meaningful because we have legs to fill them. The line presses a theological point characteristic of Chesterton—wonder and thanksgiving should attach not only to extraordinary blessings but to the basic facts of embodiment and existence. It is also a critique of modern habituation: familiarity dulls gratitude, so the task of faith (and sanity) is to recover astonishment at what seems most commonplace.