As a kid growing up in Florida for most of my formative years, winter was more of a concept than an actual season. Sure, there were days in Orlando when it dipped down into the 40s and I’d break out a pair of sweatpants to wear to school, but by and large I never experienced a true winter until I moved to New Hampshire when I was almost 13. The heaviest coat I ever needed was either a Member’s Only or a Billabong denim jacket, and the idea of galoshes or winter boots is as foreign to my childhood as snow in Miami. My hi-top Converse suited me just fine year round.
So it should come as no surprise that up until a few years ago I’d never heard of Freezy Freakies winter gloves, and it wasn’t until this year’s Christmas season that I finally discovered how much cooler my childhood could have been. My wife is always a thoughtful giver of gifts, and she always manages to find stuff for me that I never realized I wanted until I rip into the wrapping paper on Christmas morning. She has a knack of making me feel like a kid again, and it’s rad. This year, one of the biggest surprises was a pair of adult-sized Freezy Freakies Turbo Race Car gloves, and I am completely smitten with these mittens!
For those who aren’t familiar (i.e. all of you who grew up in in the Southern US or sub tropical climates like me), Freezy Freakies were a line of winter gloves for kids that had some awesome temperature-activated imagery that appeared when exposed to cold weather. Think Hypercolor shirts, but in reverse. The frigid kiss of winter made race cars, unicorns, and robots appear on the gloves like magic. This kind of interactive clothing and accessories is an aspect of the 80s that I adore and I’m actually kind of bummed that I didn’t know about these gloves until recently. I coveted stuff like the shoes that had lenticular Transformers on the sides, or the sunglasses glasses with holographic lenses that looked like eyes.
I’m super tempted to pick up another pair of these so that I can have a set in the car for when I forget to grab them before leaving the house (you can take the kid out of Florida, but it’s hard to take the Florida out of the kid.) I’m seriously considering the Alpine Skiing design…
But there are a bunch of cool ones available now (including Game of Thrones, Unicorn, Robot and Spaceship designs…)
