I Got A New Hat!

I was at a birthday party Saturday night after work with some friends from the Renaissance Festival, and while it wasn't my birthday, I received a present! My great good friend Ryan (whom I adore!) made me this hat with his own two hands and his remarkable knitting skills, toiling away for... Minutes on end? Days? Weeks? I don't know how to knit, nor do I know much about the activity knitting, so I imagine that he labored day and night for weeks between the beginning of October and last Saturday night to create this wonderful hat! Or possibly he knocked it out in one afternoon and he's been holding on to it. I couldn't say.

What I can say is that Saturday night's birthday party marked the first opportunity for him to present the present, and to do so he had to lure me from the house into a chilly, windy night. He brought it from his car as I stood, shivering. When I saw what he had, my discomfort was forgotten and I squee'd a little, ditching my winter hat to try it on.

"Does it fit?" he asked.

"As a matter of fact, it does. This is great!" I replied. "It's feckin' cold out here - let's go back in!"

He wouldn't let me wear it because he hadn't brought a gift to the party and it's probably... Tacky? Yes, tacky to bring a gift to a birthday party when the gift is for someone else. So I left it in my car and in the epilogue I've got a nifty new hat, which is awesome on all sorts of levels. Not the least of which is how I loves me some hats!

You might be wondering why Ryan made me a hat. That's a legitimate thing to wonder, and here's a story of what happened.

I've been working at the festival for quite a while, and over the years I've accumulated some costume parts. Ryan has been going to the festival for quite a while - his wife works there - but he doesn't have any costume bits. He made plans to be there on Festival Friday, a "field trip" day that was added to the last weekend of the run a few years ago. Some other "shop slaves" and I have made Festival Friday the annual date for a drunken site stumble, which is exactly what it sounds like. Festival Friday tends to be somewhat sparsely-attended, and the drunken tradition started when fellow shop slave Lewis and I were sent on an information-collecting mission. In the rain. With drinks.

This year it became "Strunken Dumble", and Ryan wanted to attend. In costume. So I let him borrow a kilt and a shirt, and when everything was done, he wanted to buy the shirt. Instead, I gave it to him.

So I suppose the hat would be more of a "barter" item than a gift.