Holy Week

One of the joys of living in northern Wisconsin is deer hunting season, more commonly referred to as Holy Week. Almost all normal life grinds to a halt as the men dress up in blaze orange and hit the woods. There is a party atmosphere all week (10 days, actually) and the bars all have specials, Hunter's dinners, Hunter's Balls, Deer Hunting Widow's balls, Buck Boards (like super bowl boards, but betting on the biggest buck, where, who, etc). We are roughly in the middle of it right now. Here I am dressed to go out to a bar for the night. The shoes are a spoof or joke as everyone knows I don't hunt. They usually get a few laughs as blaze orange penny loafers are not that common.....

..........The shirt is very interesting. It belonged to our mother, who hunted with the guys in the 50's. The state legislature decreed around 1950 that hunters wear red to cut down on the accidental shooting deaths that happen during deer hunting. The clothing manufacturers had not yet got the idea that this law opened up a whole new field of red colored outerwear, so no red heavy coats or parkas were available yet (blaze orange became state mandated "fashion" a few years later). One had to buy a red flannel shirt, split it at the seams to expand it, and wear it over your heavy coat.

Here you can see that sides and arms are split and connected by shoe strings to keep it together when you wear it over the top of everything else. This shirt has some bloodstains on the sleeves, presumably from field dressing a deer. It makes a great conversation piece and I wear it every year to one night out (we generally are out about 6 of the 10 nights)..............

(P.S. I have a feeling red outerwear WAS available then, my parents were just to poor and/or cheap to buy it for just a few days a year)

............the neatest thing, however, is the tag on the back. I love the date. Who the hell was taking care of me? I was a two year old, probably left alone with a box of cereal to entertain me for a week. The tags were cloth then, and attached to your back in some manner. Mother chose to sew this baby on, although it looks like she had been seriously drinking that afternoon. Maybe the blood on the sleeves was from a sewing machine injury!!.......

Soon another Holy Week will be history and all those bothersome naked women will disappear from our taverns. They are so irritating. The regulators of this blog and the "Church Ladies" in general would faint dead away if I tried to post pictures of the whipped cream wrestling last night at one of our neighborhood bars ..........tsk, tsk

Uncle Hans