At this time of year, it’s next to impossible to avoid hearing Irving Berlin’s “Easter Parade” from the 1933 movie “Holiday Inn” or to think about Easter bonnets. Apparently my head is an unusual shape, for I’ve never been able to keep a hat in place for long enough to turn away from the mirror. This means ANY hat – feed company caps, stocking caps, cowboy hats, anything except for a bandanna tied firmly under my chin; they simply pop off at the slightest nod or move of my head.
Still, I tried every spring to wear the requisite Easter hat my mother deemed important to go with my new Easter finery. Sometimes, depending on how early or late Easter Sunday arrived, this was a two-piece suit of skirt and matching jacket. In warmer weather it was more likely a pretty “dressy” dress or skirt and frilly blouse. The hat seemed to be required, no matter what the outfit, and apparently the rest of the town thought Mother was right, for Easter Sunday arrived amid a parade of fancy, flowery, sometimes frivolous hats that rivaled the milliner’s best efforts in the traditional show at the Kentucky Derby.
I understand that Berlin wrote the music for that song quite a few years before it was given lyrics specifically for that Fred Astaire movie (a year before I was born) and since I’ll be 89 next week, I think that’s a long time for a song to stick around basically unchanged and unchallenged by a new song for that holiday. (Did someone mutter “Here Comes Peter Cottontail”? Please! That’s right up there with “Frosty The Snowman” replacing “Deck The Halls.”).
Getting back to the subject of hats; I have noticed that, on some of those perennially re-broadcast Lawrence Welk shows, women in the crowd of dancers are often wearing hats. Thank goodness I missed that era! Wearing head-gear with any sort of evening wear would have defeated me completely – can you imagine a bandanna to match my powder blue and white eyelet prom dress? I tried to wear the hat of the year to church as Mother thought I should but usually ended up chasing it across someone’s front lawn in the wake of a playful breeze and stuffing it into my purse as a last resort. We tried using pins – those long corsage pins, since hatpins were then a thing of the past. But my hair was too fine and slippery to provide much of an anchor. A real hatpin might have done the job, but the only ones I knew of were embedded in a pincushion hanging on the mirror in my grandmother’s bedroom and a little too ornate and a lot too rusty for my taste.
Grandma also had what was known as a “hair receiver” on her dresser. This was a little vase-like container with a small opening into which she poked hair that accumulated in her hairbrush and comb. Once the hair receiver could hold no more stray hairs, it was emptied to provide stuffing for pincushions, soft toys or little padded mats to hold hot dishes. My mother found a more up-to-date use for the hair we cleaned from our brushes and combs – she put it out on the lawn for the birds to find in the spring. It seems that hair is a prized material for nest-building and the birds quickly carried away the winter’s accumulation.
I found that practice could be extended to the disposal of hair from the dogs’ grooming brushes as well as from my own. In mild weather, I made it a habit to brush our Golden Retrievers outdoors, usually on the deck where it was easy to keep them confined. I soon noticed that birds were carrying off the wads of dog hair and knowing that birds don’t waste a lot of time with useless chores, concluded that they had found a good use for it. That conclusion was confirmed further when, one afternoon our dog Babe was dozing, stretched out on a sunny spot in the yard, and a bird swooped from the timber and landed on her shoulder. Babe lifted her head and peered sleepily at the bird, then simply turned back and continued her nap. She made no objection when the bird plucked a beak-full of hair and took off, I assume, to continue building a nest.