Animal Hatz

An article wonders when& why the trend of having little kids wear hats that look like animals began:

Although it may feel natural, our visual enjoyment of the animal-kid hybrid that an ear hat temporarily creates is historically specific. A couple hundred years ago, parents would have been horrified at the idea of dressing their kids like beasts. Historian Karin Calvert writes that many of the choices colonial American parents made—from rigorous swaddling to “straighten out” limbs, to the use of “standing stools” to encourage early uprightness—came from a deep anxiety that children needed to be taught to become human. The animal-like qualities of infants and toddlers (their physical immaturity, their unpredictability) frightened, rather than entranced, these parents. Crawling and creeping, in particular, were violations of what Calvert describes as the “hierarchy of things”; children, if they were to assume their rightful human place between the animals and God, needed to “do so on their feet, not on their hands and knees.” I’m sorry to any 17^th century ghosts who had to witness my daughter crawl around the house in her tiger costume a few years ago on Halloween! The sight must have been truly disturbing.

"But Xmastime", you say in the voice of Craig “Ironhead” Heyward from those soap commercials (RIP), “didn't you write about this in your national non-selling novel years ago?"

Why yes, dear reader, yes! :)