It’s Not a Towel, It’s a Tradition

It’s all my sister’s fault.

When my daughter was a toddler, my sister made her a bunny towel. There are several ways to construct one of these critters, but essentially you get a bath towel and a hand towel. You make a hood out of part of the hand towel, add ears (made out of the rest of the hand towel) to it, and sew it to one long edge of the bath towel. The result is a cute hooded wrap that’s great for drying a shivering, fresh-from-the-bath little kid.

My daughter loved her bunny towel. She used it for years, until the ears tore off and the hood had holes in it and towel itself was so thin you could almost see through it. One day, helping me paint a bedroom, she realized that one of the rags we were using was the last remaining piece of her bunny towel. She was indignant. She was 26 at the time.

When the first grandkid came along, then, I had the bright idea of making him a bunny towel for his first Christmas. It was a hit, so naturally I also made one a couple of years later for his younger brother. By now a tradition had been started. When twin sisters showed up a few years later, of course they needed bunny towels as well.

This past Christmas, about the middle of December, it suddenly dawned on me that I had two new grandsons—grandsons whose mothers might well be expecting bunny towels.

I wasn’t enthusiastic. I don’t like to sew. It was too last-minute. I didn’t have time. The babies wouldn’t care. Maybe their mothers wouldn’t care. Maybe nobody really appreciated the towels anyway. Maybe I could do towels for their first birthdays instead.

Despite all this inner foot-dragging, somehow, when I was out finishing my Christmas shopping, a couple sets of towels found their way into my cart.

The next day, I hauled out the sewing machine. I laid out a hand towel on the dining room table and muttered to myself while I figured out how to come up with ears and how to shape the hood. No doubt this would have been easier with a pattern—but hey, anybody can follow directions. We true artistic, creative types prefer to start from scratch each time and make it up as we go, even if it takes us twice as long.

So I figured, and I measured, and I pinned, and I cut, and I sewed. An hour and a half later, I had two hooded towels. Each hood had a pair of terry-cloth ears that were more or less the same size and shape. They didn’t exactly look like bunnies. Puppies, maybe? Or kittens? Actually, they looked mostly like lopsided sheep.

But little guys not quite a year old probably don’t know a lopsided sheep from a bunny, anyway. And at least I upheld the tradition that I had inadvertently started.

Besides, getting started on the project made me forget that I didn’t have time and didn’t like to sew and didn’t want to make the towels in the first place. I had fun. And when the next grandkid comes along, I hope I can remember how I did it.