🎄Serendipitous llamas

A short sweater story

I love my ugly Christmas sweater. I bought it a few years ago from a department store in Kansas City after finding that thrift stores are rather picked clean of any options by a certain point in the season. Andy and I begrudgingly went to an actual sweater department at an actual store to look for one, but it paid off—even if paying full-department-store-price for an “ugly Christmas sweater” feels a little wrong.

It was this visit that earned the store its name in our household: Sad Macy’s. The department giant stands alone on a busy intersection after the surrounding Metro North Mall was bulldozed in 2017. When we went in December 2021, the lights were bright, the racks were stocked and tidy, but nobody was there. This would’ve been eerie any time, but on a Saturday afternoon before Christmas, it was downright depressing.

Regardless! We walked away successful, with a nice red top for more classy occasions, and a delightful sweater from the old lady department for more whimsical Christmas moments.

The black sweater has three white llamas in appliqué, each dressed up in festive Christmas attire. Across the trio, there’s a Santa hat, two strings of multicolored lights, a scarf, and a string of bells—it’s a delight. I get compliments on it constantly.

This year, we decided to stop by Lansing, Michigan, for a weekend before heading to Kalamazoo for Funk family Christmas. We lived there (Lansing, that is) from 2012 to 2019 for grad school, and have a good number of close friends still living in the area. We were very overdue for a visit.

We arrived a week ago Thursday, with plans to meet friends for dinner with their family. (Little kids are not so little after five years!) We left the planning to them. They said we’d go to Leroy’s for dinner (best olive burger of my life) and that we should meet them beforehand at the South Branch of the Lansing Library for a surprise. I wore my llama sweater, as I often do for maximum festiveness.

We roll into Lansing just as a snowstorm starts to dump, drop off our dogs and belongings at our Airbnb off South Cedar, and head to the library which is all of two minutes from where we’re staying. It’s in a strip mall. On our way over, Andy and I are trying to guess the surprise—probably one of the kids is in a group Christmas caroling or something?

We walk up to the front, where a small crowd of people is gathered on the sidewalk outside the door. They’re crowding around looking at… three llamas in festive Christmas attire.

You can imagine my reaction. One of the handlers was like, “oh you wore your sweater!” and I was too flabbergasted to be like, “BUT YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND! THIS IS A COINCIDENCE! WHAT ARE THE ACTUAL ODDS!”

Thus ends the story of meeting three llamas in festive Christmas attire while, coincidentally, wearing my sweater of three llamas in festive Christmas attire.

The End