Easter Hats

My Mom was a hat person. I remember her wearing one on Sundays to mass and every other time that she dressed up and went out. She was a tiny woman, standing 4’11” in her stocking feet. But when she wore her stylish spike heels, she stood, 5’2” with her long brown hair piled on her head. What I remember vividly was the ritual that went along with buying my mother’s hat and my hat for Easter.

I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and still can remember our all day excursion to find our hats in downtown Cleveland. My mother didn’t drive, so we took a bus from the corner of house, and it would drop us off at Public Square, right across from the Highbee’s Department store. That was always where we started and ended our mission to find our Easter hats.

After what seemed like hours, we found the right hats, matching gloves and a purse. My mother paid for our hats with her credit card. We carried them in their hatboxes with the department store’s name proudly printed across the lid.

Afterwards, we stopped at the Frosty Bar, for a delightful frosty malted drink. This delightfully thick drink was served in a small glass. The warmth from my hand seemed to melt this frosty drink. The first sip seemed to bring on one of those awful brain freezes only to end up with one of my last gulps of the melted drink splattering in my face with a plop. Then we would stop at “The Nut House,” and we bought a small bag of warmed cashew nuts to eat along the way.

The evening was spent modeling our hats for my Dad, who smiled and told us how beautiful we looked in them. Then we placed our hatboxes in our closets. Every time the closet door was opened, the hatbox was the first thing that Mom spotted, pulled down, and opened. She would look at the hat with admiration, and longing, anticipating the pleasure of putting the hat on her head again. This ritual became a daily occurrence, while the days were counted and the excitement mounted waiting for Easter Sunday, and the time when the hat would finally be worn with an outfit, for show.

When Easter Sunday arrived, the last item to go on was our new Easter hat. My Dad would drive us to church, or we would walk if the weather were nice. A sea of hats would be all you would see on Easter Sunday at church, along with the sweet scent orchid corsages, pinned onto the lapel of the women’s coats.

Somewhere in the mid 60s, wearing hats stopped being fashionable. The hat departments and Millinery Shops started to close because wearing hats seemed to go out of style. Or maybe it was that Vatican II changed things by ruling that women no longer had to where hats to church.

Now on Easter Sunday, as I sit in church in suburban Pennsylvania, I notice a sea of people with different colored hair. Once in awhile someone stands out with a hat on, and it is usually a woman in her 70s, or a younger stylish woman, or a little girl. This is when I think about those straw Easter hats, and how much I miss the ritual that went along with buying them with my Mom. Then I wonder, where have all the Easter Hats gone?