Thanksgiving Traditions (and Hats!)

Here’s something I wrote a while ago. Perhaps it will become my Thanksgiving tradition, along with sweet potato cranberry casserole and homemade pumpkin pie.


Thanksgiving is a time for thanks and hats. Just go to your local elementary school this week and you’ll see children decked out in Pilgrim hats, playing with their fellow Native Americans in homemade headdresses.

I’ve always been a hat girl. My Scottish grandmother would bundle me in coarse tam o’shanters, made from scratchy undyed wool, and during my university years I graduated to French berets, jet noir; loden festooned with a long feather; creamy cupcake pink.

I wore berets throughout my undergraduate and graduate education. They were functional, fit my considerable head, and, I liked to think, marked me as “quietly sophisticated” (ahem).

But this steady relationship was rattled when I went to New York City to visit my husband’s family one Christmas. After visiting the requisite art galleries, I ducked into Bergdorf Goodman to check out some living art—the impeccably dressed patrons who glided through the corridors.

Getting somewhat lost among the mirrored walls on the accessories level, I took a turn and found myself gazing at a hat: a Philip Treacy design. To be exact, an asymmetrical trilby, with navy cotton exterior, pewter satin lining, silver unicorn logo on the brand, provenance England. I was smitten.

Although this Irish-born, London-bred milliner known as the Mad Hatter designs wildly eccentric confections, he also makes wearable fantasies; hence the—no, my—assymetrical trilby.

Reader, I bought it. What else could I do? And I carried it down Fifth Avenue in its glistening silvery BG hatbox, feeling, perhaps, a tad guilty. For I, the feminist scholar who critiques Sister Carrie’s seduction by the snug little jackets in a Chicago department store, fell prey to the same siren song. (Theodore Dreiser’s Carrie, not Carrie Bradshaw!)

Geography, though, was the wild card I hadn’t counted on. My eccentric new navy asymmetrical trilby didn’t stand out on the fashionable streets of New York, but it practically screamed “Outsider” when I returned to the Midwest farmland where I then lived and taught college.

In the Midwest, where people pride themselves on four-post homes, three square meals a day, and unwavering moral values, asymmetry isn’t exactly a virtue. Rather, it makes people suspicious of you.

Usually I tend to court my outside status. I quite like to be contrary, so couldn’t my asymmetrical trilby coexist with the John Deere farming caps and the German Baptist bonnets? After all, I’d worn a beret for many a year and the Midwest wasn’t exactly a bastion of French style.

But whereas my beret was looked on with grudging acceptance, my trilby was more a source of humor. Noone actually said anything directly, but locals would talk to my hat instead of my face, colleagues would be overly smiley when I’d stalk around campus.

I felt self-conscious and soon found myself wearing my trilby only at home, happy to catch surprise glimpses of my reflection in the windows as I’d go about my evening. And eventually I put it away, nestled inside its hatbox, sitting at the bottom of my armoire, as I gradually forgot about it.

Until, that is, last November, when, in a burst of enthusiasm for cleaning out my closets, I rediscovered the box and its contents. I listed the hat on eBay, enjoyed a mild bidding war, and prepared to ship the trilby and box to its new owner, known to me only by her excellent feedback rating.

But when I received the eBay-generated message containing the winner’s email and home address, a different kind of feedback quickly flashed in my mind. For the new owner of my Philip Treacy trilby was a Famous New York Personality of TV and Movies, she of the high cheekbones, sassy persona, and megawatt smile.

A celebrity bought my London-via-Bergdorf’s hat. A beautiful, edgy New York celebrity. We must be soul sisters! thought I. We could bond over our love of Philip Treacy hats! We could chat over email like fashion insiders; we could meet, even, when I returned to New York on my thrice-yearly pilgrimages! We’d go hat shopping together and she could show me how she sports my—our—no, her hat in the city and makes it her own.

Or I could mail her the hat with a note saying that I hope she wears it in the best of health. Which I did.

Like Chaucer sending his “littel book” out into the world, I sent my hat back to New York, where it is meant to be, with its citified asymmetrical attitude.

Perhaps it will go dancing, to a movie premiere, to a little bistro. Perhaps one night it will even get tipsy. And I am thankful that it is with its rightful owner, someone who can literally take the hat out of her closet, who can enjoy it in public. And I can enjoy it too, from the distance of my imagination.

It’s not chilly enough here yet for my beret. But it will be soon.