Let Children Be Fancy Again

Fancy holiday parties that include children are disappearing, and I don't like it.

Me, my cousins and brother at a festive fancy Christmas party in 1998. I was inexplicably in my “Robert De Niro face” era

For as long as I can remember, I have a specific sensory memory from my childhood that’s seared into my brain. It pops into my mind constantly: the feeling of my tights-covered feet on blankets.

I don’t have this memory because I often wore tights to bed. Instead, I have this memory because of how often I found myself drifting off, or at least snuggling up, in a bed or on a cozy sofa, at fancy holiday parties. The memory itself isn’t just about the tights—it also necessitates a velvet party dress and maybe a discarded hairbow that I wore to emulate Samantha the American Girl Doll. Drowsy and wilting on a pull-out couch, wearing tights and a velvet party dress, lulled to sleep by the sounds of a holiday movie on the TV, is how I spent many-a-Saturday-night as a child, especially during the Christmas season.

Now, this was hardly the average Saturday night for me. But memories have their way of making formative events seem more frequent or prominent than they actually were. I probably attended several parties a year with my brother and parents, including ones that they threw—but that’s far more child-friendly fancy parties than I attend now, as a thirty-something mother of two children, which is…uhh…zero child-friendly fancy events.

I asked my mother if I was misremembering. She told me that although we weren’t attending parties on a weekly basis, the ones we did attend—including fancy-attire holiday and cocktail parties—included children. Parents would take turns watching or holding babies and toddlers, while children over the age of three were basically left to their own devices—often watching movies in a back room or running around the house making innocent mischief. “They would run around, gather,” she said. “You’d try to find a bathroom, open a door and see a bunch of kids huddled in a bedroom plotting God knows what. Sometimes you’d find them watching TV or movies.”

The pranks we plotted (which were never terribly disruptive) were on full display at my parents’ annual fancy holiday party—something to which I looked forward all year, held in almost as high regard as Christmas morning. As school-age kids, my best friend Molly and I would sit at a second story window and use string to dangle naked Barbies at all the guests entering the house. This was hardly the only child-driven activity that materialized at this party. One year, the children separated into two rival factions, and colonized different bedrooms in our own make-believe war, and another time, we all put on a musical for our parents. As pre-teens, the girls would gather around a camcorder and produce music videos, or gossip about the one singular cute (and completely silent) boy whose parents had dragged him along.

We did this in our crushed velvet dresses, patent leather mary janes, sweater vests, and dorky little suspenders. We chased each other around Christmas decorations, made crafts to show our parents, and stayed up way past our bedtimes, all in our holiday finery. Not to get all RETVRN on everyone, but it seems alien today to imagine a fancy party that includes children—even weddings generally exclude children, and the only parties that include them are the ones explicitly for them, hosted at explicitly child-friendly, ugly, often sports-oriented venues. I can’t help but wonder if this seemingly minor change represents something bigger and broken about how we view parenthood and children in general.