Advent Calendar, Day 2

An LG Christmas story, written by yours truly!  ;-)

A Special Christmas Dress    

      All my childhood, my family had a tradition of going to my Aunt and Uncle’s house on Christmas for dinner. They were my Dad’s brother and sister-in-law, and lived closer to us than any other relative – 35 miles as opposed to 250. It was weird though, because we only saw them at Christmas and sometimes we saw the relatives that lived further away more often than we saw them. Also they never came to our house – I think I can remember only two visits we had from them, and those were short.

      That was my later childhood I guess though. Early on there was more contact. My aunt and uncle had a son and three daughters. Each of the daughters did come out to spend a couple or more weeks with us. The last to visit was the eldest daughter, named Kim, when she was 14. The first I recall was Julie, the youngest daughter, when she was just a baby and my aunt was in the hospital for surgery. My mom offered to take care of Julie, and I remember helping take care of her. I could have only been three myself, but I recall a few things from that period of time.

      The event I want to bring up now though happened later than that. I was 10 and Julie was 8. If you know me, or have read any of my stories before, you know I am somewhat small, and always was for my age all through my childhood. I was always the shortest in my class (until 12th grade, when I passed one of the girls.  Yes, just one of them.) All that I say to tell you this – I was the same size as Julie that year. (The next year, she was taller than me…)

      When we got to the house, Julie was wearing a purple velvet dress with white lace at the edge of the sleeves, collar, and in a ruffle at the bottom. It had some silvery threads running through it, and a big white satin sash around it tied in a bow in back. She had a ribbon in her hair that matched the sash on the dress. The dress puffed WAY out; of course at the time I had no idea about petticoats and such that girls wore with their dresses. She had on white tights, and the shiny black patent leather Mary Jane shoes that were so common on little girls back then. For some reason, I found myself drawn to the dress and could barely take my eyes off it.

      The crowd for dinner at my aunt’s was fairly large each year and as a result, those who were younger had to sit at the “childrens' table”, a card table that was set up off to the side in the living room. Julie and I were the youngest, and therefore the last to finally leave this table. This year, we were the only two left at it, since the others had rebelled and would no longer sit at a table with “children” when they were SOOO much older and more mature than we. (I’m not bitter, I’m just telling you what they said!) They fixed the problem by setting up yet another table out in the kitchen.

      Julie and I therefore had the whole table to ourselves. While I was talking to her, my eyes kept wondering back to her dress, and she noticed I was staring at it. Finally, she said, “Do you like my dress?” holding her arms out so I could get the full view. Blushing as though I had been caught at something, I nodded. This guilty look was not lost on Julie. She continued, “Well, it is a chore to wear, you know. It is a bit hot, and I have to be super careful not to get any food on it – do you know Mom almost made me wear a bib? And it is hard to sit down in it with all this extra, and you can’t even get into it by yourself. The tights are itching my legs and my shoes are pinching my feet. Boys are lucky they don’t have to wear dresses like this.”

     “I think it is beautiful,” I said before I thought of the implications of the statement.

      “Really?” Julie giggled. “I bet you wouldn’t think so if YOU were the one wearing it!” I blushed again, and this confirmed in Julie’s mind what she was suspecting. A small grin tugged at the corners of her mouth. “Would you?” She was forcing an answer from me.

      “Uh…umm…I…” I faltered for words, causing her grin to become wider.

      “Well, maybe you should try it just to see what I mean,” she said.

      I regained my voice. “Of course not!” I said indignantly. “Boys don’t wear dresses!”

      “Some boys,” Julie said, “would be prettier in these dresses than some girls are. Some boys might actually be girls in their hearts.”

      “Maybe SOME boys,” I relented. I figured that was safe enough to say without letting on that I might BE one of them. We were too young at the time to understand much about the difference between genders anyway. Most of what we knew was limited to boys wear pants, girls wear dresses, girls play with dolls, boys play with toy cars. I liked toy cars. We continued with eating, Julie not pressing me about the dress any more.

      After we ate, Julie wanted me to go up to her room with her. I didn’t want to at first. They had an Atari in the basement playroom, and I was highly interested in that since my parents wouldn’t get one. Julie let me play a few games, then sat down and played a few with me. She didn’t seem very good, which was why I agreed with her that if she won the next three games I would go up to her bedroom to play with her for a while. Those three games lasted about 10 minutes. I still wonder if Julie was just a shark, or if deep down I really did want to go to her room.

      Everything about Julie’s bedroom said eight year old girl. Cabbage Patch Kids were big at that time, and she had several of them as well as some more conventional type dolls. I noticed a few Rainbow Brite and Strawberry Shortcake themes as well. The room was less than immaculate with some of her clothes scattered about on the floor and hanging over a chair. These she quickly picked up and threw them in the closet.

      I looked around the room, and then noticed she was pushing the door closed. “What are you doing?” I asked her.

      “Well, you don’t want anyone watching while you change clothes,” she said. She waited for the confusion to register on my face before going on. “I thought we might play dress-up. *I* think *you* want to try my Christmas dress, and I can wear your clothes.”

      “No way!” I said. “I’m not wearing a dress!” Inside, my feelings were screaming the opposite thing.

      “Oh, come on. It’s only a game of dress-up,” Julie said, making her eyes wide and innocent. Why are girls so GOOD at that? “You didn’t get me a present,” Julie pouted. “You could make this my present; playing a game of dress-up with me, and letting me choose the clothes.”

      “Well…” I faltered, and Julie capitalized on it.

      “Great!” she started to unbutton my shirt.

      “I can undress myself!” I snapped, blushing as soon as I realized what I said.

      “Okay, but I can’t,” Julie said. “You’re gonna have to help me with this stuff.” She turned around and held her hair up in the back. “Unzip me,” she requested. I had never done that before, and though I was not one of those boys who thought that all girls had cooties, I found this to be a hard thing to do. I stood as far as I could from Julie and reached way out with my arm, taking the zipper in the very tips of my fingers to tug it down. I blushed as the white satin of her petticoat showed from underneath.

      Julie then contorted her body into an angle I had never seen a human do before, and had the dress off in a second. I stood staring at the petticoat (which I still didn’t know what it was); three layers of ruffles on the skirt part, and every bit as fancy as the dress itself had been. Julie rolled her eyes finally and said, “Just what I thought. You like looking at girls in their underwear.” I blushed and started to stutter out a reply, but she cut me off saying, “Would you please hurry up? It will be New Years before you get into this stuff!”

      I thought about making her turn around first, but since she had just accused me of staring at her underwear, it didn’t seem like the right thing to do. Besides, we were cousins and had seen each other in our underwear before. I quickly took off my shirt, undershirt, pants, and socks. My boots were already off and sitting downstairs on their porch. Even though Julie and I had seen each other in our underwear before, now I felt a bit awkward.

      I reached for the dress, and Julie smacked my hands away. “Not YET,” she sighed exaggeratedly. “You don’t have half the things you put on first!  Sheesh. Oh! I almost forgot!” She opened a dresser drawer and drew out two things, handing them to me. I looked at them – a pair of flowered panties and a small white roll. I unrolled it and realized it was a pair of tights, though they looked extremely small. “Put those on,” Julie instructed.

      “Aww, come on, Julie!” I complained. “Why do I gotta wear these too? Can’t I just wear the dress?”

      “You won’t get the full effect!” she said. “Look, I’ll turn around if that is what is bothering you.” She turned her back to me, the petticoat swinging out as she did. I stared at them another minute, then drew my own underwear off and pulled the panties up my legs and into place. These felt a lot different than my own underpants, and I realized it was not a bad feeling.

      I then looked at the tights. “These are WAY too small,” I told her.

      “The tights?” she asked, turning around. She laughed. “They stretch,” she said. I looked at them, a bit confused. “Here.” She took them from me, bunched one leg up to the foot. “Sit down on the bed and hold out your foot,” she told me. I did as she said. “Your OTHER foot.”

      “Oh.” I put my other foot out, and she pulled the tights over it, and up my leg to the knee. Then she did the same with the other leg. Last she tugged them all the way up, making me lay on my back on the bed and put my feet in the air so she could get them in place.

      “This is as hard as dressing a baby,” I thought I heard her mutter as I stood up then. She tugged and made a few adjustments to the tights. I was getting used to the feeling of having these things hug my legs and push them into shape. They were a bit itchy, perhaps, but I knew I could easily get used to these. I was beginning to enjoy this, not that I would ever let Julie know that! “Okay, help me out of the petticoat,” she said, holding her arms up.

      I pulled it up over her head, so that now both of us were standing in just a pair of panties and white tights. “We could almost be twins,” Julie said, catching sight of our reflections in the mirror. She was right. Then she took hold of the petticoat and helped me get it over my body. “A dress like this absolutely HAS to have a petticoat under it,” Julie said with a smile.

      “A what?” I popped my head out over the abundance of lace.

      “A petticoat. What you are putting on now,” she giggled at my confusion. “Gee, you have a lot to learn about girl’s clothes, don’t you? Boys clothes are so simple – underwear, socks, shirt, pants…” she pointed to each item as she named them. “Girls have tights, nylons, slips, petticoats, half-slips, coulettes, skorts, slacks, skirts, dresses, bras – and about a dozen different styles of panties. You have shoes. We have pumps, flats, heels of different heights, sandals… it gets confusing sometimes. And we have to match it all, and THEN do our hair and make-up! And you probably wondered why it takes girls so long to get dressed.” Julie’s complaints were somewhat funny and probably picked up from her older sisters, since she didn’t wear make-up or heels or a bra yet.

      I shook my body a bit and the petticoat fell right into place. “Hey! You did that pretty good – just like a real girl,” Julie teased. “I told you you must have some girl blood!” I just rolled my eyes and held my arms up so she would help me into the dress.

      “See? The petticoat makes the dress stand out,” Julie said as the dress fell into place over the petticoat. “And it makes it swing and swish when you twirl,” she went on, making several adjustments to the dress. She took the zipper and pulled it up, much more easily than I had taken it down when she was wearing the dress.

      “Umph,” I grunted as she pulled the sash tight around my waist to tie it. “Sorry. It has to be tight,” she said. “It doesn’t look right otherwise.” She picked up my shirt and slipped into it, buttoning it as she said, “I was getting cold.” She stripped her tights down her legs. “Might be colder like this, but those things ITCH!” She was wearing little pink panties with hearts on them, and covered them quickly with my pants. “Yep – we are exactly the same size,” she told me.

      She looked at my feet and handed me the Mary Janes, which I immediately figured out I could not put on while wearing the dress. “I can’t see my feet,” I complained.

      “Oh for heaven’s sake!” She took the shoes from me and put them on my feet, buckling them on just right. In the mirror I could see that my body had been transformed and I was beginning to look very much like the pretty girl Julie had mentioned earlier. She grabbed a hairbrush and comb next and went to work on my hair. It had been quite awhile since my last haircut, so she at least had some to work with, I watched in the mirror as she worked on it, finally taking a ribbon the same color as her own and working it into my hair. “It would be better if it was longer,” she admitted, “But I think it looks pretty girlish like that.” And it did.

      Next she had me hold my hands out. “Jeez! How did you get them so LONG?” she exclaimed, staring at my long, unkempt nails.

      I shrugged. “By never cutting them.” She gave me a dirty look. I never could stand having my nails short, whenever one broke it would bother me until it grew out again, so I never cut them. Unfortunately I also never trimmed or filed them either, which Julie promptly took care of with her manicure set, as well as cleaning them. After that, she took out a bottle of nail polish, and painted my nails a glistening pink color.

      “I got this for Christmas,” she told me. “It’s my first nail polish, and I also got this.” She pulled out a box that had different types of lip gloss. “You can use some of this too – you put it on like this.” She took some on her fingers and smeared it on her lips, then puckered them and wiped the excess on a tissue. “It’s my first lip gloss too, but I’ve been sneaking some of Kim’s,” she admitted.

      Since this was her first make-up, I felt it was very special that she actually allowed me to use some of it, and I thanked her. “No problem,” she said. “You’re more fun to play with when you are a girl.”

      I was kind of taken aback by that comment until I thought about it. “You’re more fun to play with when I am a girl too,” I told her, and we both giggled. Something was happening to me, though I couldn’t figure out what. I could never imagine giggling like that with my friend Ricky. I also could never imagine Ricky and I playing with a doll house, which is what I began to do then with Julie.

      It was some time later when my aunt opened the bedroom door. “Julie, what are you two doing up her…Oh!” She stared at me for a minute. “Well don’t YOU look sweet,” she said after a minute.

      “Umm – I’m sorry!  I … we were just…” I tried to stutter out some excuse as to why I would be dressed like this.

      “I know what you ‘were just’ doing,” my aunt said. “You were just going to get my special niece to come and visit me, right?” Julie giggled as my aunt sat down and retied the sash into a better bow.

      She wanted me to come downstairs so she could show me off to the rest of the family, but I was far too shy to let everyone else see me like that. I did let Kim see me before the day was over, and she actually gave me some of her own lip gloss to take home with me. “Just don’t wear any to school,” she warned me. “They might not understand,” she went on with a wink.

      My aunt must have also told my Mom, although she never brought it up. I just noticed that every so often I would open my closet, and a brand new dress in my size would be hanging in it, right in front where I would have to see it.

      When I went home that evening, I wore the tights and panties under my pants. And for quite a few years after that, Julie and I always played “dress-up” at Christmastime.