Something that never fails to bring me joy is $1 Target seasonal socks. I know I’m not alone in my enjoyment of fancy, patterned socks—they’re the subject of entire specialty stores, one of which is even a 5-minute drive from my apartment, not to mention the staggering variety available online. Patterned socks are a way to be wild, or twee, or geeky in secret, a mark of personality that doesn’t necessarily have to be shared with anyone else.
The only trouble, I find, with many of the patterned socks available out there is their price. If we accept the fatuous financial advice currency of lattes (Give up one latte a day and soon—!) most pairs cost two lattes, if not three. For me, that makes them a “get one pair and try to really, really enjoy it” item. A “self-control” item. And that’s not a simple pleasure anymore. That’s an adulting pleasure, one that drags with it a complicated tangle of required self-control and then guilt if you fail to properly deploy that control. And I understand the appeal of purchasing one, ridiculously expensive chocolate truffle and savoring every single bite (all two of them). I do! But I also understand a wish to sometimes stuff yourself with chocolate and not have to either blow your monthly grocery budget in one trip to the artisan chocolate store or have your coworker look at you and sniff, “How can you eat those store brand chocolates? They taste like wax.”
So along with my adulting pleasures, I treasure my simple ones, including $1 Target seasonal socks. Target, at least on the West Coast where I’ve been patronizing them, has a separate huddle of shelves near one set of doors with a changing selection of items for either $1 or $3. Usually the items are décor related to the latest holiday, and quite often they include a selection of patterned socks. Now, the patterns may not be quite to the level of unicorns fighting with lightsabers, or whatever I last saw in the window of the sock specialty store, but with ghosts, reindeer, chicks, candy corn, wild zigzags, and many more, they’re not boring! While I confine my wearing of the Halloween patterns to the month of October, most of the rest of the specific holiday ones are sufficiently “generally spring” or “generally winter” they can be worn widely. And most of the time no one’s seeing my socks anyway, so one day in September I could be wearing pastel Easter bunnies and you can’t stop me.
Target socks also provide me with the additional pleasurable aspects of anticipation and surprise. Over the years (yes, I’ve been buying Target socks for years) I’ve learned their schedule—wait two to three days for the stock to be turned over after a major holiday; there are always Christmas socks without fail, but summer is a wildcard season—and I’m always eager to get to the store when it’s time for the stock to have turned. What will the designs be this year? Sometimes they skip a holiday and sometimes a new one is thrown in (this year was the first year with Pride socks). It’s always a delightful surprise.
Now, I can hear the naysayers among you thinking: ah, but three-latte socks will no doubt last for years, while $1 socks will disintegrate after two wearings. When I first discovered them, I thought so too. Pick up a pair, and it’s clear the fabric is a bit thinner than that of more expensive socks. But. Of mumblty pairs I have purchased and worn over the better part of a decade, one—one!—has so far developed a hole.
$1 Target seasonal socks endure.
One of the things I enjoy most in my writing is extended metaphors, and these socks had come to seem like a metaphor for life to me. They’re not fancy, but they’re fun, and despite their humble appearance and price, they just keep going. The colors dim a little, they pill a bit at the edges, but wear them and wash them, wear them and wash them, these socks won’t be torn.
I’m wearing a pair right now, of course. Today, it’s fuzzy reindeer faces.
Rhiannon Held writes urban fantasy, along with space opera and weird western (as R. Z. Held). She lives in Seattle, where she works as an archaeologist for an environmental compliance firm. At work, she mostly uses her degree for copy-editing technical reports; in writing, she uses it for cultural world-building; in public, she’ll probably use it to check the mold seams on the wine bottle at dinner.
In 2018, she took leave of her senses and brought out three books: MIRROR BOUND , a stand-alone urban fantasy focused on the non-human forced to work with a monster-fighting team; DEATH-TOUCHED, the fifth and final book in the Silver series of anthropologically grounded werewolf urban fantasy; and LADY’S CHILDREN, a collection of Silver short fiction that includes a never-before-published novella with an archaeologist excavating a werewolf site.
In her other identity, she also had a weird western short story, Red Dreams , come out in the Beneath Ceaseless Skies science fantasy issue this year.
Find Rhiannon Held online at her website, on twitter, or on Goodreads. http://rhiannonheld.com/@rhiannonheld
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5324198.Rhiannon_Held
