I don’t really like big fancy Christmas parties.  Or any parties that involve dressing up, wearing cute (read: skimpy) clothes in winter weather, talking to people I don’t know very well or leaving my house at night.  I realize that admitting this lack of party girl attitude makes me seem old and not very fun, which are both true to a certain extent.  However, it’s not that I lack Christmas spirit.  I asked if I could please stay home and let the babysitter go with Taido so I could read Christmas stories and make cocoa and cookies with all the children, of which there would be about 10.

Since Taido wasn’t excited about that plan, I resolved to get my grumpy self ready for a party.  This involved figuring out what to wear, a process that usually consists of picking up my jeans, icebreakers and wool socks off of the floor.  And while icebreakers are quite practical for winter nights, they don’t really qualify for evening wear.

Earlier that same week I had remembered that somewhere in a tub in the garage I had a dressy sort of sweater I bought in Venice when Taido and I were there for our anniversary several years ago (sigh).  I also remembered that it was gray.  I think it was packed away because a) I had trouble figuring out what to wear with it and b) I never dress up.  So when I went to Target to buy whole grain Goldfish crackers (they are the only store in town that carries them in the big box…just so you know), I put it on my list to look around for a black skirt.  Well, I found a gray wool skirt at Target that was 75% off  and in my haste over finding a dressy skirt for only $5, I snatched it up and completely missed that all of a sudden I was going to be trying to match gray with, um, another gray.

I only realized that this was a problem when I started trying to get dressed for the party.  I dug out my Italy sweater and put it on the bed with the skirt.  Gray and another entirely different gray.  Really?  And right here is the explanation for why I usually just let Whitney buy all my clothes, except for camping gear, of course, which the gearhead handles.

Unfortunately for me, Whitney was really busy taking lots of pictures and does not (my assumption) have time for my little fashion challenges.  So, I dug around in the tub and found yet another sweater just like the gray one, but it was pink.  Why did I buy two identical sweaters in Venice?  Friends, I do not even know.  Something about it being the end of our vacation and trying to get enough gifts to go around and really I just have no idea but now I am thinking How about that pink sweater with the gray skirt?  Can you even wear pink with dreads? I thought a long time about the dreadlocks before I actually got them, but one detail I overlooked is that they are sort of a permanent accessory with which not everything goes.  At this point I decided to just go ahead and try the whole outfit on, and so I started to look for my black tights. I bought not one but TWO pairs of black tights in October because I can never find any and I wanted to be SURE to have some this year when the weather turned cold.  Yes I did.  I bought those black tights and then I came home and promptly HID THEM FROM MYSELF.  At least that is what I was thinking when I was dumping everything out of the tubs in my closet looking for them.  They were not in either of the shoe boxes nicely labeled tights.

Of course, this is the moment that I should have called Whitney regardless of her busy schedule and the fact that even at that very moment she was taking pictures somewhere.  If I had interrupted her photo shoot, she would have at the very least said to me, Alison, whatever you do, do NOT put on your pajamas. Which is exactly what I did do.  In the pile of clothing in my room, my soft pajama pants were entirely too inviting.  We will wrap you up and comfort you, they said.  So of course, I put them on and then I walked straight out of that bedroom with the exploding closet and put on the tea kettle, which was downstairs far far away from the messy reminders that a party was looming over my head.