Christmas Dresses

It’s almost Christmas and I’m soon headed back to the land of milk and cheese to celebrate with my wonderful family. In the spirit of Christmas and family and all that fabulous stuff, I wanted to share one of my favorite holiday traditions: new Christmas dresses.

New Christmas dresses are extra special.  Not only are the new and for Christmas Eve at Grandmas, they’re made with tender loving care.  Every year growing up, Mommy would take us to the fabric store a month or so before Christmas to pick out our patterns and fabrics.  Christmas always had the fanciest fabrics of the year, velvets and satins and rich colors. 

We’d sit at the pattern table pouring through books, me driving Mommy nuts with “could you change this to this and remove this and add this?”  And Alfred driving us all nuts complaining she didn’t like the color of the dress in the book.  (For those who don’t sew, you can make the dress whatever color you want.) 

After we finally picked our patterns, including Mommy picking out her own, we’d head into the fabric section to continue driving Mommy crazy by either picking out the most expensive or most difficult to sew fabrics, slippery fabrics that would slide off the machine, patterned fabrics that would need to be lined up and crazy fabrics that were not suited to the pattern we’d just picked out.  Mommy would talk us into something more reasonable or somehow make the fabric work.
My sisters and me in our slippery fabrics. (and the only time you’ll see Alfred in better shoes than me.)

Sometimes, Alfred and Munchkinhead and I would all match.  Sometimes, Mommy would match, too.  One year, Mommy made Munchkinhead and Alfred’s Barbies Christmas dresses to match their own.  I was Mommy’s Barbie because we had matching dresses, too.

And there was that year I wanted my dress to be just like one of my Holiday Barbies’.  Poor Mommy; that must have been an extra headache.  That particular Holiday Barbie wore a long, poofy, green velvet frock with detailed beading all up the bodice and sparkles from the hem up.  Mommy did a pretty good job coming up with something close.

Barbie is the one on the left.

The dresses didn’t always turn out perfect - there was that one year she put my skirt on Alfred’s bodice and vice versa.  Alfred had a very beautiful flowy gown, and I had a mini-dress. And my size in high school and college fluctuated so much dresses often barely fit by Christmas – but we always loved our Christmas dresses.

Now that I’m too big to live at home, I make my own Christmas dresses.  It doesn’t always go well and they’re never as pretty as Mommy’s, but it’s still fun.

Incidentally, that dress was from last Christmas and it no longer fits, but the dress Mommy made me in 1998 still does.