“The Party Line,” by Julia Reed, was originally published in the December 1996 issue of Vogue.
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So far this season I have bought: a chocolate-brown wool-jersey evening gown with a slit up the front and five-inch chocolate peau de soie Manolo Blahniks to match; an aubergine chiffon Empire-waist cocktail dress like Emma s and Josephine s, not quite but almost as brilliant as Galliano s interpretations; a navy silk Oscar de la Renta with a bow at the neckline and a crinoline beneath the skirt (very un-me, but so pretty and party-girl and cheap I got it at the Super Sale in Washington to benefit breast cancer research); a black velvet Saint Laurent dress and a black YSL ottoman-silk suit; a long, skinny black wool coat with a Mongolian-lamb collar, two evening bags, another pair of Manolos, and a wad of Chanel pearls. This does not mean that I am very social or very rich (it means, in fact, that I am broke and devoid of anything to wear at any time prior to, say, eight o clock at night). It means that I have a wardrobe for which I have no immediate plans. And I really wish someone I know would have a Christmas party.
Not an office Christmas party like in the movies, where everybody gets drunk and wears funny hats and somebody invariably gets caught with somebody else on top of the Xerox machine. Nor do I mean a real-life office party, one of those boring corporate affairs where people wear slightly dressier versions of what they wear to work every day, and it s always in a restaurant where they start setting tables for real customers at eight o clock, so everybody has to clear out. And the ones that drag on are even worse, full of all that obligatory camaraderie—there s no romance, no glamour, not even the hint of surprise. What I want to go to is a real old-fashioned holiday party, one that s big and lavish and even a little magical, where all the guests look beautiful and the setting could be a stage—a party like the one in the opening scene of The Nutcracker (my favorite version is Baryshnikov s, because the wife gets a diamond necklace just before the guests arrive) or indeed in the opening fashion spread of this issue.
Nobody has these anymore, but they used to. One year my mother had three of them back-to-back, with at least 100 people each, and I got to wear the blue velvet dress with the white lace collar I wore in my aunt s wedding and take the coats at the door. A very sexy Englishman I d never seen before tipped me $2, which I kept for years as a souvenir, a link not only to this unspeakably handsome man but also to the soigné night in which I had played a tiny part. My mother had a different outfit for each party, and my favorite was the white silk crepe pantsuit, with narrow pants and a short-sleeved tunic that had hunky glass sapphires, emeralds, and rubies around its sort of Greek neckline. It was very chic and very Versace and I would wear it now myself, but for the fact that about two minutes before the guests arrived my little brother threw a cup of Welch s grape juice from his high chair, and it landed across my mother s snow-white front, and she had to change into the red-and-gold plaid hostess skirt and red satin blouse she d worn the night before.
I will never forget the preparations that went into those parties, the garlands everywhere, and the huge tree with literally hundreds of strings of tiny white lights, and the dozens and dozens of votive candles that had to be lit with long matches at the very last minute. There were bartenders in white coats and hordes of people in the kitchen making homemade rolls and mayonnaise for the turkey, pouring sherry into the seafood Newburg and icing petits fours. And the guests made an effort, too—they looked different, better, far more glamorous than they did at any other time in the year. The ladies wore hairpieces or even tinsel in their hair, and dark makeup and big earrings (this was the sixties); the men wore red vests and holly pants and ties with tiny Christmas trees. They laughed more and talked faster. Their cheeks were flushed and their senses heightened. Turned on by the brisk weather or the pine scent or the booze or the sheer built-in anticipation of the season, they all acted as if they knew something exciting and wonderful was going to happen before the evening ended—they just didn t know what it was yet. New Year s parties are always awful because they are about pressure (to have fun, to get drunk, to be kissed); at their best, Christmas parties are about possibility. School s out and work s over and people s houses aren t their houses anymore—the furniture s all rearranged to make room for the Christmas tree; angels fly from the ceiling. They ve become sets, and the thing about sets is that whatever happens inside them is fantasy.
Now I am overdue for a dose of fantasy, not to mention possibility. I have worked like a dog this year, and I want a reward before the next one starts. I want to do more than just get through my work and finish my shopping, have my packages frantically FedExed, all in time to race home to my family where everybody is exhausted, too, and we put on sweaters and sweatpants and lie around on the sofas to watch videos, and all the people who used to have festive parties are at their houses doing the same thing. I m ready for some sugarplums to be dancing in my head; I want my pulse to quicken as I pick up my long skirt and mount some stairs to greet something wonderful that I don t know about waiting at the top. I want something surprising and grand and intimate all at the same time. I want to see people I love and people I ll want to. I want a buzz. I want to return home trailing my evening coat with an empty champagne glass in my hand and a dreamy look on my dramatically made-up face.
I just saw an Estée Lauder ad that said, "Sparkle for the Holidays" with lip and cheek and nail color that "shimmers between silver and gold." I would like to shimmer, but I need a place to do it, along with a place to wear all the clothes I bought this year, not to mention the ones I ve stockpiled virtually unworn from all the boring years before: skinny red velvet pants, green chiffon pants with black-and-white velvet daisies, a black-and-silver bugle-beaded shift, black satin Manolos adorned with loose strands of crystals and pearls.
The first clothes I wore to Christmas parties were the ones I got for Christmas. We always had lots of people over on Christmas night, and my earliest ensembles at these events included a chamois Indian-chief costume with full headdress from F.A.O. Schwarz, a pink tulle tutu and matching leotard with satin slippers, and a gypsy dress with a multicolored striped satin skirt with a black velvet sequined bodice and matching headpiece with ribbon streamers. My friends all wore velvet dresses with big sashes and the boys wore matching jumpers or pants with white oxfords, and we would drink sparkling Catawba grape juice and pretend it was champagne and set off Roman candles on the front porch and eat dressing balls and bourbon balls and spy on the adults, which we could not wait to be.
All my parents friends had parties, too. When I hit adolescence, I would get my tips on what to wear to those events from my twin style bibles, the holiday issues of Mademoiselle and Glamour. One year Mademoiselle recommended spray painting an old pair of shoes silver, so I sprayed my scuffed white clogs and pinned rhinestones to the pink pleated chiffon blouse my grandmother had given me. I wore this with some pink pants to the huge Christmas Eve party we went to every year, and it was the first year I didn t have to go upstairs and eat cookies and drink punch with the children. Downstairs, the drinks were served in silver julep cups and there were all kinds of things in chafing dishes to eat with toast points, and red velvet cake and caramel cakes, and women with long legs and long necks sitting on the stairs looking up with bright eyes and naughty smiles at the men they were talking to. One year at one of these parties I kissed a man I still secretly adore on the roof of the house (it was Victorian, and you could walk right out the upstairs dormer windows and find a level place to stand); another year a man got locked in the bathroom (adorned with greenery and red and white bunting and scented Christmas candles) and there was so much noise that nobody heard him, so he called his baby-sitter at home and told her to call back and tell whoever answered the phone to come and find him. It took the baby-sitter three tries to find anybody who cared enough to stop what they were doing long enough to get him out.
When I was about twelve or thirteen there was—in Glamour this time—a red satin dress that I really wanted. (Actually I wanted it for the rendezvous with Robert Redford and Paul Newman that my best friend, Jessica, and I had planned—we were going to send an invitation to each man for a surprise party in honor of the other and explain that the location was Greenville, Mississippi, so as to avoid the media.) The rendezvous, needless to say, did not work out, and I didn t get the dress, either, but my friend M.T. got one almost like it, red taffeta with a full, long skirt and a tight bodice with two rows of ruffles around the breathtakingly low scoop neck, to wear to the Christmas party her parents always had. Her grandmother took one look at that neckline and told her that people would talk and she said, "Oh, Nana, if they only would!" Exactly. That same year her mother wore silver moiré pants with a sash and a silver organza blouse and looked like an angel, and another year to the same party I wore a brown velvet suit with a gray satin blouse that I had to get a job at McDonald s just to pay for.
The great thing about the holidays is that people you ve never seen before turn up—people s relatives, their college roommates, boys who went off to college years earlier and return as accomplished cellists or brilliant surgeons. One year at M.T. s house I met somebody s long-lost brother just back from South Africa, all mysterious and exciting with curly dark hair and a mustache. Years later M.T. s own brother returned from the 1 Peace Corps in Mauretania and gave hisfather an African boubou, which he proudly wore to the party instead of his usual red pants with the holly stripes up the sides. At one of my own parents parties an old beau of mine walked, uninvited, through the front door at midnight, sat down, and started playing the piano. The next thing I knew someone had woken up my neighbor to get a guitar, and somebody else found a tambourine, and we stuck holly in our hair and drank gin and danced and made up song lyrics about everybody we knew till dawn. I remember that I had on a burnt-out green velvet dress and earrings so long they grazed my shoulders, and that my fiancé at the time had gone to bed extremely early. It was raining so hard when it was finally time to go that everybody s cars got stuck in the front yard. So we ate breakfast and sang some more instead.
That was a long time ago and, unfortunately, the last great Christmas party I ve been to. I asked a friend of mine how long it had been since she d been to a great one and she said never. Another friend said it was about fifteen years ago, when she ended up with somebody in a closet. Closets are a recurring theme. My old boarding-school roommate ended up in one with her old boyfriend at a Christmas party, and they eloped that very night. Now, I don t have to have something that extreme happen to me this Christmas, but a little something unexpected would be nice, festive even, true to the season. Every year when I was little I had an Advent calendar, and each morning before I went to school, I got to open up another tiny cardboard door and a nut or a piece of candy or a little surprise was behind it. Well, I would like to put on one of my new dresses and my new coat and my five-inch heels and some false eyelashes and glittery lipstick and open a door and find a little surprise behind it. It shouldn t be too much to ask.