Break free, my friends! This winter, do not submit to the tyranny of pants, weather be damned!

[Or, you know, submit and all, if you like pants. Or have to wait for the bus. I’d feel really terrible if you ended up with pneumonia or something.]

Where was I? Oh, yes. I was telling you about how much I hate pants.

I’ve never been a fan of pants (as long-time BCRL readers well know), but the extra 20 pounds I haven’t managed to budge since my daughter was born have made me really dislike pants. And, conversely, really love dresses. So easy. So comfortable. Who needs pants?

Now, if you want to get technical, you could say that I’m actually wearing pants here. I mean, some people consider leggings to be pants. I don’t, but some days I feel like I’m in the minority with that. What’s the consensus?

Snow days in Edmonton are about as ubiquitous as grains of sand on the beach, so I don’t take them all that seriously until much later in the game. Like when they dump 2 feet of snow on my driveway. A few inches … eh. Time to wear a dress.

I was especially excited about this particular dress, so I was going to wear it regardless, snow day or no snow day. First of all, it’s hella cute. Check it:

Secondly, it cost me $6 at Value Village. Did I mention it’s a Marc by Marc Jacobs dress? It has a retro-boho vibe that works perfectly with my MJ Kirsten bag. It’s almost as if they were designed by the same person … OK, that was my really lame attempt at fashion humour. Don’t worry, I’m not quitting my day job any time soon.

Especially since I also fail at taking fashun bloggery photos. For the record, this wasn’t an attempt to be cute; my husband had just remarked that my nose would put Rudolph’s to shame, and I was feeling a little, um, self-conscious. Oh well, it all goes with the snow day territory.

I feel like this outfit straddled the line between Willy Wonka-ville ridiculous and pretty cool, and it was the black cardigan that played the biggest role in keeping it in that precarious balance. Sometimes, you just need a little bit of black to keep an outfit grounded.

I have been wearing black and blue a lot lately, and I think it’s starting to affect me subliminally. Or maybe I’m just suffering early winter dysphoria. In any case, this turned out to be a happy blue outfit – mostly because I got a kick out of it’s almost-ridiculousness.