The Christmas Dress

As I recall, for I was very young, it was the biggest box under the Christmas tree that year. It was wrapped in shiny department store paper, touting a big red bow. That in itself made us giddy waiting for it to be opened, since all other packages were wrapped rather haphazardly in last years Christmas paper. The tag read; to Kathryn from Fred, my mom and dad.
Christmas day arrived and mother opened the package and I held my breath in anticipation. I remember thinking for a brief moment before I became caught up in the excitement of what was inside, that my mother had a strange look on her face. She then held up what I thought was the most beautiful dress in my memory. I remember it to this day. It was a cocktail dress, the first I had ever seen. The skirt was black crepe, with a pabulum encircling the waist, a bodice of flesh colored satin with a black lace overlay, and the sweetest little cap sleeves.
In reflecting on that morning many years later, I think of what must have gone through my mother’s mind. A cocktail dress? She had never attended a cocktail party or any affair that would have ever enabled her to wear such a dress. She probably thought of all the things she so needed and could have bought with the monies spent on the dress. But she graciously accepted it and then hung it in the closet. Well, actually many closets, as it went with us in several moves.
As the years passed and the dress was never worn, we would ask her what she planned to do with it and she would answer “I guess I’ll just be buried in it”. Eventually the dress moved from the closet to a trunk, buried deep amongst everything else my mother saved.
When mother passed away, my sister and I removed the dress to take it to the funeral director. She at last would wear the dress. But alas, as the years passed, it was apparent it was not going to fit mother.
We were saddened. So we decided to keep it and share it as for what ever reasons we too couldn’t part with the dress. I don’t recall the logistics of how we decided who was to have it and for how long. I only remember that it hung in my closet for years and moved with me from one state to another. And there it hung in the back of my closet, just has it had in my mothers, long forgotten.
One February as I was cleaning out the closet I came upon the dress. Memories of that Christmas morning long ago came rushing forward and I was saddened. My father had never seen my mother in the dress and mother had stored it waiting for a day that would never come. A gift given, a treasure saved for naught.
I decided I needed to wear the dress to honor my father and mother. It so happened it was close to Valentines Day, the perfect day I thought, for its unveiling.
A plan emerged; I would have a special Valentines Day candlelight dinner with my husband, and I would wear the dress.
The day came and I prepared a special dinner, setting the table in all its finest. I carefully slipped into the dress, which was now vintage and therefore fragile and suffering from a few moth holes. Suddenly I was transformed back to that Christmas morning when I had first seen the dress. It still held for me its mysterious beauty of satin and lace.
That evening as candles flickered and shadows danced off the walls, as the flesh colored satin seem to shimmer in their light, the dress seemed even more beautiful than I remembered. It at last had its day of honor.
Now, years later, when I think of the dress I remember Jesus words;
 “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Matthew 6:19-20 (NIV).
The dress represented a treasure stored up and never worn by my mother. But the good news is she didn’t need to wear it, she was the treasure on earth through her kindness to others. And she knew her treasures would be in heaven where she would be dressed in the shining cloth of God’s glory.