Miss Xmas!

A Christmas Outfit...for reals

About which, more later. In the meantime, read "A Dangerous Lag In the Holiday".

Later. The above is what you get if you use Google Images, searching for "women's Christmas outfits". Actually, what you get is babes in Santa-slut outfits gently flicking a whip, round-faced mommies in Mrs. Claus red flannel nightgowns and ruffly mobcaps, and this one. Dress? Housecoat? Fiercely nuts? You decide. I love the notion of a hard-charging Christmas mom stumping into the family Christmas morning on her big square gift-wrapped feet. Even better, I like to think of her in the kitchen, whipping up her special Holiday Waffle Surprise while dressed as a tree. But this post isn't about beating up people who have delusions of Christmas.

Or maybe it is.

When your own Writer to the Stars was just a young twinkler, she took a job at one of the big DC tony department stores at the start of The Holiday, that is to say, before Hallowe'en. Here I'll segue off into a chunk of one of my short stories, since it sums up what the job entailed:

When you were at your most naive and, you hope, your stupidest, you took a job as Miss Christmas in a DC department store. You weren't the only one. There were swarms of Miss Christmases, a few as young and dumb as you were, a few who were young but hard-eyed, and a few who were young but already exuded a slutty passivity. Being Miss Christmas called for all of you to dress like a package: to hide your torsos in a brightly wrapped box, to wear red tights and high heels, to tie bows and gift cards around your necks and to top your heads with fake fuzzy poinsettias.

By October, the store had launched a flotilla of Miss Christmases throughout the store. Whenever a man appeared (and you were ordered only to wait on men), you were to clop over to him rustling seductively in your box, and announce, "I'm your Miss Christmas! May I help you with your Christmas shopping?" No matter how vile the response, you were supposed to whisk him through one expensive department after another, cajoling him into spending, spending, spending. Each Miss Christmas had to make $200 a day, which meant, in 1964 dollars, a lot of men.

Your own station was by the E Street door, where timed squirts of Elizabeth Arden's Blue Grass spattered over you at three minute intervals. Somehow, reeking like a chorus boy, your box becoming more battered by the week, your poinsettia more frowzy, you managed to live through three exhausting months as Miss Christmas. Out of the gray, anonymous hordes, you still recall helping Avril Harriman, the entire cotton lobby, and a whooping drunken sailor. After work, in The Blue Mirror Bar, drinking whiskey sours, playing Pretty Woman over and over on the jukebox, you sat collapsed in a tufted booth, feeling assailed, dented, much worse for wear.

You gave up your cherished dream of being a high-priced call girl or, for that matter, any other occupation involving high heels.

Excerpt from: What A Job Will Do

Yeah. Retail. It sucked.