Christmas: Green Tights

I blogged last week about the annual staff Christmas skit we produced in Princeton. One year, the church Christmas party deadline loomed while the creative juices weren’t flowing. As a last resort, we decided to have the Sr. Pastor dress up as Santa Claus and I would be his helper elf.

My wife did a superb job of putting together an elf costume from scratch. I was completely decked out; she even created size 13 elf shoes with pointy toes and bells! The worst of it was having to wear green queen-sized pantyhose.

Now, you have to understand, being dressed up was not new to me. As a blonde-haired, blue-eye six-year-old surrounded by brown-skinned, brown-eyed Filipinos, the schoolteachers always gave me prominent parts in their lavish productions – after all, in their eyes I was a living doll. It was the opposite of Where’s Waldo, I stood out in a crowd. Their productions required me to wear makeup and the like, which I greatly disliked, but was usually bribed to accept with money or a liter of soda. But wearing green tights at the church Christmas party was a different category. Tights just don’t look good.

To top things off, that year the church Christmas party was held at a restaurant that was hosting other functions. I didn’t have the privilege of wearing this getup in the security of the church, I was out in public, changing in the restaurant bathroom and having to pass other guests on my way back to party. Fortunately, the party ended without incident and I still have the tights to this day.

Of course, Pastor Scott’s resume includes a green tights incident (see the April 9 entry) as well. With all the other zany things that we’ve done at Grace over the past year-and-a-half, green tights might make a comeback.