OBTW/Hope for the hat

I mean the one with the hat, over there on the right.

The hat is a gift from my co-workers and I love it.

Hildy Johnson never had such a cool hat as this one.

Remember the days when most people, especially women, wore hats?

Well, okay, admitting to memories of the days when women wore hats might be more than you're willing to take on. It certainly does imply you're on the shady side of 50 ... or 60 ...

But there's nothing like a hat to convey a certain air of -- oh, what can we call it? Mystery? Attitude? Panache?

Maybe it's all those things.

When I was a little girl, I had to wear a hat to church every Sunday. And gloves. And a skirt or a dress. I did like to dress up. We wore uniforms to school every day, so dressing up for church was special.

No Easter outfit would have been complete without a new hat. When I look back at some of the pictures from those days, I cringe (or laugh out loud -- what was I thinking?). Some of the hats were really dreadful. Too many flowers, not enough style or too much hat, not enough face.

My father wore a hat to work every day of the week as part of his Air Force uniform. Other than that, though, he never wore one. Which made it all the more surprising to see, in pictures of him in his 20s, that he wore a hat quite a lot of the time -- and he looked very nice in them, too.

Of course, my mother wore hats. A lady didn't go out of the house, certainly not anywhere important, without one. Another picture comes to mind -- of my parents at a nightclub just days after Dad returned from Europe at the end of World War II. And there she is, in a chic little hat and veil, looking very sophisticated.

Men used to wear hats, too. Fedoras or Borsalinos or Homburgs ... the occasional top hat for formal occasions. In the summer, they often wore straw hats. Look at pictures from the 1940s and 1950s and earlier in the 20th century, and you will notice most of the men are wearing hats, even at baseball games.

And then one day, it seemed that hats just disappeared from men's heads. It was as if some gigantic hand swooped down from the sky and snatched all the hats at once.

Jan. 20, 1961, a sunny but bitterly cold day, was the beginning of the end of hats for men, or so the legend goes.

On that day, a youthful John F. Kennedy gave his inaugural address in Washington. He stood at the podium, young and handsome, and delivered a forceful speech wearing a coat and gloves ... and no hat.

Other presidents had doffed their hats before delivering their speeches, and Kennedy did not do without the usual formal top hat for the entire day. There are plenty of pictures of him wearing it, both before and after the speech.

It's been said that Kennedy's hatlessness started a steep decline in the hat industry, but that appears not to be true. It's more likely that men's hats disappeared when men started wearing their hair a little longer -- it's hard enough for women to take a man seriously when his hair is longer than theirs, let alone if he makes the mistake of topping it with a hat.

Whatever the reason men's hats disappeared, that certainly was not the case for women's hats. A version of the white pillbox hat Jackie Kennedy wore that same inauguration day suddenly appeared on every woman's head, apparently placed there by the same hand that snatched the men's hats away.

On the day of her husband's assassination less than three years later, Jackie Kennedy was again wearing a pillbox hat, pink this time, and at the funeral later that week, a black pillbox. All three of those images are timeless, all three anchored by those beautiful hats.

Today, women rarely wear hats. Women's hats experienced a small revival in the late 60s and 70s, with floppy hats that went with "granny" dresses and laceup boots. Rocker Janis Joplin often wore hats or stuck feathers in her hair.

For men, though, hats are definitely back. For a short time a few years ago, a John Deere hat was absolutely "the" thing to wear. Apparently, the thinking was that if Ashton Kutcher could slap on a hat with a leaping deer on it, and still land a woman who looked like Demi Moore, all things were possible if you owned the same hat he did.

I do appreciate the "convenience" of wearing a hat with a bill so the bill faces backwards, I really do. I just think it looks ridiculous. Ditto the visor worn backwards and upside-down. And double ditto the hat pulled sideways. If you're under five years old, it looks cute. If you're over five years old, it looks ridiculous. Yes, it does.

My new hat is beautiful and I love it. I wish more women would wear them so I won't look quite so conspicuous when I wear mine, but I will still wear it. I wish men would wear hats more often, too, and not just baseball caps.

I wish people dressed up more, too. I miss that a lot. The pendulum of fashion may one day swing back to something more than jeans and a T-shirt, and I hope I'm around to see it.

In the meantime, I'll just get dressed up and wear my beautiful hat and feel old-fashioned and cool at the same time.

If you haven't finished your Christmas shopping, there's still plenty of time.

Plenty of time to run out and buy someone a hat.