If the Glove Fits, Buy It

I love those little knit “magic gloves” that you can buy two for $1.50 at the local CVS. They are warm enough when I am driving and walking the two blocks to my office in almost any temperature, and fit nicely into the pocket of any coat. The gloves fit on either hand. My purse is large enough that I have actually misplaced a pair in there. If you misplace one pair or it begins to unravel (which often happens – hey, for 75 cents, what do you expect?) you always have a spare.

Unfortunately we’re having a Bad Winter. On one bitterly cold day during the 10 consecutive days of snowfall we had last month my husband and I were trying to shovel snow off the front steps and sidewalk. It turns out that my seemingly ideal little gloves are completely insufficient when shoveling snow when it is 2 degrees and windy outside.

I grudgingly decided that I would break down and buy myself a new pair of heavy, water-proof gloves. I headed up to Macy’s on my lunch hour the next day to buy a pair of “real” gloves. That should have been simple enough, right?

The first obstacle I faced was the Hat Department, which was positioned directly between the entrance and the Glove Department. Wow, there were so many really dashing, fashionable, cute winter hats there, all on displays with huge SALE signs on them. I’m not really a hat person, and I wasn’t in the market for a hat, but I am a serious fan of SALE signs. Well, I thought, it might be fun to try a few on… and so like a moth to the flame I headed for the shiny, red SALE signs.

Without going into all the painful details, none of the hats I tried on fit me. It seems that hat manufacturers had suddenly decided that one size hat fits all heads, but those of us who have heads know this just isn’t true. And if the hat manufacturers used their heads, they’d know it, too. Well, don’t get me started. Admittedly, I have a freakishly large head. I didn’t want any of their damn hats anyway, and they probably wouldn’t even have kept my ears warm.

I finally reached the gloves, my actual destination. Did you know that they have now started making fitted gloves that are “one size fits all”, too? Come on, people! Get a grip! One size of non-knit fitted gloves does NOT and never will fit every hand. They are called “fitted” for a reason. Don’t they know that that is what makes the magic gloves magic? That they start out real small, but then stretch to fit most hands? Unlike REGULAR gloves! I do NOT have abnormally large hands, and yet I tried on dozens of fitted gloves without success. Rack after rack of gloves. Some I could barely fit on, some I couldn’t get on at all. In the gloves that came in sizes, the old fashioned way, they didn’t have the larger sizes in stock.

Finally, I found one single pair of “extra large” red micro-suede, water-resistant gloves that fit, that would not only be good for shoveling snow in single digit weather, but were presentable enough to wear in regular weather and which matched most of my other winter accessories. They were too expensive even with a 25% discount, but I grabbed them and bought them before they could get away. Of course, once I bought these gloves, the snow immediately stopped and it warmed up. I thought perhaps by purchasing these gloves I had single handedly guaranteed an end to the snow, and temperate weather for the rest of the winter. That really would have been worth the investment. No such luck. Although we did enjoy two weeks of snowless, comparatively warmer days, we are at the beginning of a "snow event" right now. Seems the power of these gloves to prevent snow and cold is limited, but they never claimed to be magic.