Brittany Hodak set a Guinness world record in December 2005, while she was still a student at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway.
“I got several of my friends together and we sewed the world’s largest Christmas stocking” - 54 feet tall - “and we filled it with 13,000 toys that we had collected and were to be donated to be distributed to the Salvation Army and Toys for Tots,” Hodak says.
She got onto the project as a way of fulfilling her honors-college thesis requirement.
“Mine was supposed to be kind of the predecessor to ZinePak, a deluxe edition magazine/CD for this band that I’d been a fan of and had been signed to a label,” she says. “I followed them through four or five of their big promotional shows, to take photographs and do interviews, and I had this package that was pretty much ready to be released.
“And then the band broke up.”
She panicked.
“I needed something I could do quickly that was big and over the top. And I wanted to do something that generated good publicity for the school,” and also to help folks on the Gulf Coast, which had just been walloped by Hurricane Katrina.
She spotted the Guinness record for the largest Christmas stocking and decided to go after it. She bought a sewing machine,learned to sew and started gathering volunteers and fabric - more than 120 pounds of fleece.
“The Today show flew me and my friend Brad to [New York] to be on the Today show, and they spread out the stocking in Rockefeller Center,” where it got covered with and soaked by snow - luckily, after the Guinness folks had measured its length, Hodak says.
Hodak is not certain what became of it: “We gave it to the Marine Corps in Little Rock; for a couple of years they used it to fill with Toys for Tots donations.”
But her Christmas stocking world record is no more. The current record holder is just over 168 feet in length.
Style, Pages 47 on 12/29/2013