Ongoing rebellion

Yes, Pretty Lady must confess that it is true. Despite the fact that within the last week, she has been inundated to the point of immersion with depressive rants, anti-capitalistic screeds, atheistic diatribes, protestations of disaffected anomie, and People Buying Tickets to China, her mood remains somewhat festive. In fact, she and her Japanese neighbor seem to be forming an inchoate Celebratory Cabal. Friday evening, the two of us constructed the above-pictured sample of confectionary excess; irregularities in icicle formation may be attributed, in equal parts, to lack of experience with pastry bags, and overconsumption of eggnog and Dewar's.

As if this were not shocking enough, on Saturday afternoon the two of us went Christmas shopping. Indeed. We even enjoyed it; the combination of two sets of eyes, attuned each to her own aesthetic and temperamental frequencies, meant that many extraordinary things were discovered that might have been Passed By, had we been trolling the streets alone. Pretty Lady now knows where one buys exotic beer, in singles or in quantity, wholesale. She possesses the actual contact information for a lady who special-orders and custom-imports handmade decorative wood-and-leather boxes from West Africa. Thanks to her friend, she is now intimately familiar with the inside of a shop where one buys Nifty Things for Boys, all specially gift-wrapped with shiny high-security packaging.

And of course, there was Pretty Lady's Waterloo, the Sample Sale.

Parents of daughters aged one to seventeen, Pretty Lady has some very serious advice for you. This advice is: Allow your daughter to choose her own clothing, now and then. Do not restrict her too severely to the bounds of perceived Good Taste, no matter how much you may wish to muffle the little darling in serge, acrylic and tweed, for her own good, and the Good of Society. If she wants to dress like a kitty cat, or a fairy princess, or Scarlett O'Hara, let her. She is not interviewing for a job at the Republican National Headquarters just yet. There is time. Do not panic.

If you do not do this, if you rigidly and continuously thrust your budding princess into stiff, sexless cutouts from The Preppie Handbook, if you swath her eternally in oversized Catholic school prison garb, if you squelch every yearning toward sartorial frivolity on your little girl's part, for whatever noble sociopolitical reason, be warned that you are creating a monster. Not a bland and well-adjusted future medical student. A monster.

Because a daughter thus molded and suppressed will then never get it out of her system. While shopping most nobly for Improving Literature, and Pragmatic Gadgets, and Warm Winter Woolens that Go With Everything, she will not be able to focus. Every nerve in her blighted seven-year-old id will be calling out for that blue velvet and purple silk Cinderella dress at the end of the rack. She will not be able to help trying it on. Just to see. She will be genuinely disturbed when it fits as if tailored specifically to her measurements; she will be confused and befuddled when every person in the room, even those with no vested interest in selling dresses, makes awed and approving noises. She will thrust it precipitately back on the rack and flee the shop.

But her seven-year-old id, unsatiated in youth, forever keening and hollow, will not shut up. Three hours later, ground down by its insistent prodding, she will return to the sample sale and charge the dress. Thus insuring that her entire future will be mortaged to an impulse that, if only propitiated early enough in life, might have subsided into mere casual flirtation.

Parents, do not sabotage your child's future in this cruel way. Allow your daughter the indulgence of velour and the occasional sequin, even if it clashes with her spectacles. Bite your tongue when she exuberantly dons the red top with the purple skirt and the aquamarine slippers. Let her imagination run free, at a time in life when indulging it is a matter of pennies, not pounds.