One time when I was younger, I was walking through a store with my mom around the holidays and spotted the most fabulous pair of pink cowboy boots that have ever existed. They were a soft pink – nothing garish – with white embroidery and a delicate steel detail on the toe. Really, just exquisite.

I pointed them out to my mom, who agreed that they were lovely but pointed out that they weren’t very practical for a 5 year old living in the suburbs. I gave them one last parting gaze and tried to put them behind me, sure that I would never see them again.

What I didn’t know was that, somehow, my parents had already anticipated my falling head over heels with the boots and had purchased them as a Christmas gift. How they knew this, we may never know, but to say that my excitement on the morning of the 25th bordered on tinkle-in-your-Christmas-pajamas ecstatic would be an understatement.

The boots that I had tried to accept as gone forever were sitting there in the box, shiny and pink, and they were all mine.

I wore the boots all the time. The combination of a child’s naïveté regarding fashion and a complete obsession with the boots encouraged me to pair them with  outfits that some might argue didn’t match, per se, but that certainly didn’t slow me down. Take the teal velour number adorned with a panda, for instance. Or the all-red sweatsuit, complete with the name of our town written vertically down the leg. Of course, you couldn’t see the whole name of the town because the pants were tucked into the boots – I mean, what’s the point of rocking a kickass pair of cowboy boots if you’re just going to cover them up with some elastic-bottomed sweat pants?

It’s fashion, people. Try to keep up.

But like all good things, my time with the boots had to come to an end. I had pretty much worn the soles out and one of the steel toe adornments had long since fallen off, so the boots were given a proper hero’s goodbye. I campaigned to have them bronzed, but it was no use. Their time had come.

After a proper mourning period, I moved on with my life in a pair of Keds with curled laces. Sure, they looked awesome and arguably matched my clothes a lot better, but I always had a little cowboy boot-shaped hole in my heart.

Alas, a mother’s instinct is strong; though I tried to hide my sorrow, she saw right through my facade and made the next Christmas just as special.