Maybe it is just my age. Or maybe it was seeing Bernie Sanders last year. Whatever it is, I’m thinking of trading in my gloves for mittens.
Like many, I started my life wearing mittens in the winter. Some days that were really cold, it could even be two pair. A smaller pair inside and a big pair that went almost to my elbow on the outside. Both were likely handmade and it usually wouldn’t take too long before they got soaked through from playing in the snow. There could even be days when a mitten change would be required. Possibly due to the wetness of the mittens, but more likely due to the buildup of snow and ice which made it impossible to use your hands.
Some of these mittens would even be tied together. Supposedly so one would not go missing by itself. Of course, if your friends ever found out they would try to pull one, causing the other to rise up and smack you in the face. I’m not sure it ever really worked that way, but it was fun to try.
Then I got to the point of wearing gloves. Gloves were much more adult. They had fingers. You could do stuff with gloves that you couldn’t do with mittens.
But last weekend while I was out walking the dog, wearing my gloves in minus a million temperatures or whatever it was, I started to wonder why I was wearing gloves. Wouldn’t mittens be warmer?
Bernie looked pretty toasty as he sat through the inauguration last January. And he was wearing mittens. Maybe I should try wearing mittens again.
Yes, gloves have fingers. And having fingers means you have these little individual things sticking out in the wind to get cold on their own. If you want to warm your fingers up, you have to pull them into the palm of the glove and… wear them like mittens.
Would mittens actually be warmer? I don’t know. I haven’t owned a pair of mittens since about the age of ten. But maybe it’s time to try.
And if I got a big pair of mittens, almost like the outer mittens I had as a kid, you could even wear your gloves inside them. So if you needed fingers, you could just remove the outer mitten and use your gloved hand, without exposing your fingers to the cold.
Really, mittens should be warmer. You have the collective heat of all your fingers to keep each other warm. It’s no longer every finger for itself.
So maybe mittens are the option.
Now all I have to do is learn how to knit.
