Seventy years ago Addie Crist and Irene Flanders sat together to sew six red cloth stockings.

More than a decade ago Ida (Buzzy) Gardner wrote a story about a woman who brought small toys to young children on Martha's Vineyard. The Santa Claus Lady was her name, and as the story goes she "brought Christmas in tiny packages wrapped in odd pieces of paper tightly tied with bits of ribbon."

When Lorraine Clark walks into Grace Church in Vineyard Haven on the morning of Dec. 17, Christmas officially begins.

There, packed high to the ceiling and filling almost every available space will be over 250 large, white bags - each one stuffed with dozens of wrapped gifts. Each bag will be marked with its own number, and soon people will trickle in to claim them.

Red Stocking Fillers This Year Will Delight 270 Island Children

By ALEXIS TONTI

At the other end of the year from the sleek summer fundraising season, a grassroots charity pursues its purpose.

The Red Stocking Fund holds no auctions or celebrity fundraisers. It has no board of directors, and its managers bear no administrative titles. The core group of volunteers meets only once a year to set the date - this year, Dec. 19 - on which strained and straitened parents will receive the Island's gifts for more than 270 of its children.

"Christmas was about getting nothing," she says in clipped Yankee cadence. Lorraine Beaucaire Clark's family did not speak English when they came from Portugal; her great-uncle, a Chilmark resident for 55 years,speaks only Portuguese.