Tomorrow (as I write this) is not just the day after Mother’s Day, it’s also, traditionally, Straw Hat day.
I covered a lot of this last Felt Hat Day. Tomorrow is the day on which it traditionally becomes acceptable to wear a straw hat… sort of like not wearing white until after Memorial Day. When this was the norm, straw hats were mostly boaters and Panamas, neither of which you see much any more.
Generally, I observe this stuff to some degree. Sort of. That is, I usually don’t wear straw hats (or reasonable facsimiles) until after Straw Hat Day, but the reverse doesn’t hold true much. They’re silly in the rain, and I won’t go bare-headed in the rain by choice, so I end up wearing felt hats on occasion all summer long. Also, some outfits just scream out for a felt hat rather than a straw, and frankly, I don’t find the straw hats I have to be that much cooler than felt in practice. After all, the traditional cowboy hats that were considered absolutely essential for living outdoors in the prairie and desert were felt.
This year I have to admit I jumped the gun as well, I was facing a longish car trip out to an early dinner and back, and my favorite sunglasses and my backup pair both broke within a week. I needed a hat to cut the sun while driving, it was going up to almost 75 degrees F, and, let’s face it, nobody cares. Almost nobody even knows.
Still, there is value and often lessons to be learned from traditions, in understanding them if not always following them. This used to be important, because everyone wore hats. Everyone wore hats for good reasons (when anything persists for thousands of years, there are good reasons), and understanding those is important because even if they don’t apply in your life now, they’re part of how we got where we are, and things change. Someday we may need the tools of the past again.
So, Happy Straw Hat Day. It’s a ritual of the beginning of summer, something worthy of marking and celebrating in some way, however small, and wearing a straw hat for the first time in the season is certainly not that demanding, a very small token, especially if we can also honor the past and those who lived it at with the same simple gesture.
– Robert the Wombat