The Most Dangerous Time of Year

The joints that boss around your left and right feet, that shoulder your shin bones and act as hats upon your heels are no longer safe.

The most dangerous time of year has commenced.

But the perils that linger are not what one might assume them to be. (E.g. that CVS or your preferred prescriptive drug haven has decided to display its Easter baskets for the year 2017 now, causing you to assume you’re in the wrong year, so panic sets in; a mild stroke follows, expensive ambulance bill agony ensues.) Rather, December’s true hazards lurk like the monsters beneath our beds with outstretched arms and creepy hands, grabbing at our ankles, hoping we will trip.

Yes, trip.

Hasn’t it occurred to you that after all these years, the terrible thing that rests on its belly below your ruffled PB Teen duster never actually ate you? Or killed you? Didn’t even make a single ungentlemanly attempt at getting under your duvet with you? No. He merely caused you to trip.

But tripping is no laughing matter, especially in slippery December when we’re still high off the hubris of fall. For at least two months we wrapped our necks in scarves yet laughed in the face of a below-the-knee breeze, baring our ankles as though this were some kind of exhibitionist free-for-all at the community performing arts center. But let’s get it together, people. This is the Ice Age, and we can’t let our ankles go extinct.

So how do we protect them? How do we band together in these coming weeks, when friends will surely suggest such treacherous activities as ice skating or taking a walk? When pants remain cropped yet the shoes we previously paired them with offer no support should we step on snow-laden cobblestone cracks and lurch in ways that could break our own backs, not to mention our mothers’? What about the cold? Unless I forgot to check my email and missed some very important memo, insulated muffs have yet to be invented for our human fetlocks.

The only way we know how: with ankle boots. They will act as the preemptive casts to our not-yet-broken benders, the backbones of body parts that are very much not our backs, the masts of the flags that we’ll hoist which declare: “Ladies! (Bros!) We are not afraid!”

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It’s 3 o’clock. Do you know where your ankles are?