By AMY FREESE
DesignHer Living columnist

My daughter and I received a Christmas party invite to her dance school and included in the invite was this:

‘MOMS & DANCERS – Christmas Sweater Competition – pull out all the stops and wear the most outrageous tacky Christmas sweater you can find!’

My response to this not-out-of-the-norm-dress-code direction was, “Oh, great, here we go again.”   Now typically I would be fired up and ready to take on the ‘tacky challenge’ but this time I’m a little leery of this outrageous opportunity.

I haven’t always been the scrooge of the sweater charade.  Let me take you back to the time when I became the object of the dress code dupe.  It went down like this.   I knew in an instant that I wanted to accept the invitation from my ready-for-a-great-laugh new party host friend when she invited me to her Speakers Association Christmas party. I had just joined the association and was excited to meet the other members.

Included in her invitation she shared, “It will be a great time to meet other speakers from the area and they’ll be able to get to know you as a speaker but you have to wear your crazy Christmas costume!” Always the party gal and never the party pooper, I promised to play along even though my closet had been rehabbed of tacky sweaters long ago.

Because the host was always up for fun and didn’t like it when others didn’t play along, I knew that I had to find the tacky spirit within me whether I had a sweater to don or not.  Therefore, I had to do what I tell my wardrobe clients to do and go shopping in my own closet first.  I knew there had to be something that was screaming Christmas Catastrophe.  And like my clients, once I searched in my own closet…

When what to my wandering eyes should appear, but my unfashionable grandma’s gaudy gargantuan Maude inspired moo-moo! With its sorta, kinda Christmas color design I was ‘in like flint!’

Driving that evening to the party I imagined what the other fun party–goers would tackily be wearing and couldn’t wait to lay eyes on the spirit-filled party host’s sensational selection. 

Ding-dong the doorbell rings and duped is what this ding-dong felt when the host opened the door to welcome me adorned in her spectacularly stunning, all-black outfit.

In a hushed tone and with a deer-in-the-headlights expression I asked my runway-ready friend where her ‘costume’ was.  She said she changed her mind and with my quick glance at her guests they apparently changed theirs too. 

Due to the fact her foyer opened into the area where all of her fashionably festive and Christmas casual guests mingled, I tried to keep my horror on the down-low in fear that I would come off vain and shallow for making a big deal about the way I was adorned. Therefore, I strutted in with my ‘freese cool’ composure acting as if I had planned weeks to strut my stuff in my merry moo-moo.

Relatively speaking this was one of the more embarrassing situations I had found myself in a long time.  The only thing I could liken it to was one of those bad dreams where you find yourself naked in front of your audience but this time I was amongst calm, cool and collected speaker-type people looking like I was in character so I could star in a Maude spin-off.

To keep myself from calling out the host and coming off as an insecure victim of fashion, I self-talked my way through the evening telling myself to just carry on and keep calm and convincing myself that maybe my moo-moo wasn’t all that outrageous. Perhaps, I was even raising the bar in festive holiday wear. 

My words to the host at the close of the evening were that she had done me a favor by giving me the title of my first book, “Wear It Well.”

Well, this isn’t a book but I do believe no matter what we wear if we choose to hang on to the truth of our inner selves then our light will and can always shine and overshadow any style speed bumps.  I believe situations like these allow an opportunity for our humility muscle to get flexed and our desire for approval to diminish. 

Who cares that the guests hadn’t probably laid eyes on a moo-moo since the ‘70s and who cares that I stuck out like a sore thumb because I probably wouldn’t have remembered the party had this lil’ bling blip not happened.

Sometimes it’s the ‘boy was my face red’ moments of life that we learn the most and really, aren’t they the most memorable too?  It really comes down to how you react to those mishaps and whether you’re going to let them make you or break you?

So if the dress code is Christmas Casual, Fashionably Festive, or Outrageously Tacky this season my wish for you is to ‘wear it well’.

To check out my “Merry Moo-Moo” visit my blog at AmyFreese.com.

Amy Freese is a life and style expert. Contact her at amy@designerherliving.com or visit her website at www.amyfreese.com.