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some chestnuts and—”
    “GET OUT!” Langston and Benny both yelled.
    So much for day before the day before Christmas Eve cheer. When we were little, the Christmas countdown began a week in advance and always started with either Langston or me greeting each other at breakfast by saying, “Good morning! And happy day before the day before the day before the day before Christmas!” And so on until the real day.
    I wondered what kind of monsters lurked in theaters to prey on people sitting by themselves because their brothers wouldn’t get out of bed to take them to the movies. I figured I’d better get mean real fast so I could be prepared for any dangerous scenario. I got dressed, wrapped my special present, then stood in front of the bathroom mirror, where I practiced making scary faces that would ward off any movie monsters preying upon single-seated persons.
    As I practiced my meanest face—tongue wagging out, nose crinkled, eyes at a most hateful glare—I saw Benny standing behind me in the bathroom hallway. “Why are you making kitten faces in the mirror?” he asked, yawning.
    “They’re mean faces!” I said.
    Benny said, “Look, that outfit you’re wearing is gonna scare papi off more than your mean kitten face. What are you wearing, Little Miss Quinceañera Gone Batshit?”
    I looked down at my outfit: oxford uniform school shirt tucked into a knee-length lime-green felt material skirt with a reindeer embroidered on it, candy-cane-colored swirled stockings, and beat-up Chucks on my feet.
    “What’s the matter with my outfit?” I asked, smiling upside down into a … * shudder * … frown. “I think my outfit is very festive for the day before the day before Christmas. And for a movie about a reindeer. Anyway, I thought you went back to sleep.”
    “Bathroom break.” Benny inspected me head to toe. “No,” he said. “The shoes don’t work. If you’re gonna go with that outfit, you might as well go all out. C’mon.”
    He took my hand and dragged me to the closet in my room. He perused through the heaps of Converse sneakers. “You don’t got no other types of shoes?” he said.
    “Only in our old dress-up-clothes trunk,” I said, joking.
    “Perfect,” he said.
    Benny darted over to the old trunk in the corner of my room, pulling out tulle tutus, yards of muumuus, #1 FAN baseball caps, fireman hats, princess slippers, platform shoes, and an alarming number of Crocs, until finally he grabbed for our Great-aunt Ida’s retired tasseled majorette boots, with taps still on the toes and heels. “These fit you?” Benny asked.
    I tried them on. “A little big, but I guess.” The boots spiced up my candy-cane-colored stockings nicely. I liked.
    “Awesome. They’ll go great with your winter hat.”
    My winter head-warming accessory of choice is a vintage red knit hat with pom-poms dangling down from the ears. It’s “vintage” in the sense of being a hat I made for my fourth-grade school Christmas pageant production of A Christmas Carol(ing) A-go-go , the Dickens-inspired disco musical I had to heavily lobby our school principal to allow to be staged. Some people are so rigidly secular.
    My outfit complete, I walked outside toward the subway. I almost returned inside to change my shoes from the majorette boots to my old familiar Chucks, but the tapping noises from my feet hitting the pavement were comfortingly festive, so I didn’t, even though the boots were too big and my feet kept almost walking right out of them. ( These boots were made for … slipping out of … la la la … ha ha ha .)
    I had to acknowledge that despite my excitement to follow the trail of mystery snarl, any boy who left me a ticket to see Gramma Got Run Over by a Reindeer would unlikely turn out to be a keeper. The title, quite simply, offended me. Langston says I should have a better sense of humor about these things, but I don’t see what’s so funny about the idea of a reindeer going after one of our senior