I took the above photograph at a college football game I attended with my kids on Saturday. Please note that the person wearing a hoodie near the bottom is also wearing shorts.
While some people may be surprised at seeing someone wearing shorts in such conditions, it’s not an uncommon site in Utah. In fact I counted three people at the game who were dressed in a similar fashion.
Wearing shorts in the winter was something that became popular back when I was high school. (I never did it simply because my mom would have killed me for dressing like that in the winter.) Based on the way I see teenagers dressed when out in public, apparently is still is. If it was just the kid in the photograph, I would have chalked it up to being young and fashionable. But the other two people I saw had to be in their late twenties or early thirties. And when I posted the picture on Twitter, another Utahan mentioned that she saw someone wearing flip-flops during the storm.
While I can kind of see being able to justify wearing shorts in the winter when one is going to spend their the day in school or some other warm place indoors, wearing them to a football game when there’s a foot of snow on the ground, temperatures are near freezing, and it snowed during half the game is very perplexing.
On the way home from the game I started wondering whether or not wearing shorts in freezing weather is a Utah thing or part of a larger trend I don’t know about. When I lived in Wyoming for two years immediately after high school, I don’t recall seeing anyone wearing shorts in the winter whether at college or anywhere else in public. So, readers, I want to hear from you. Do they do this North Dakota or Canada when there’s a blizzard outside? What about New Hampshire? Is Utah the only place where this is cool? Let me know in the comments below.