On Maryland’s Eastern Shore and in a handful of other ports around the country, there is a sailors’ tradition of burning your socks on the vernal equinox, the first day of Spring. If you have been wearing the same woolen stockings all winter, this may be a good time to commit them to the flames.

As ancient traditions go, this one is pretty new. According to Preservation Maryland, after a particularly snowy winter in 1978, Annapolitan Bob Tuner was anxious to shed his socks with the arrival of spring. He invited his colleagues to celebrate the end of winter by burning their socks after work, a symbolic goodbye to winter as the group of boat builders, sailors, and watermen intended to forgo wearing socks until the cold weather returned; and so a tradition was born.

This year’s celebration in Annapolis, which includes an oyster roast as well as the ritual sock burning, is being held this weekend on Saturday, March 23, 2019, from noon to 4 p.m.  Unfortunately tickets to the official event are sold out. Which doesn’t preclude holding your own sock burning.   

The tradition of sock burning has spread across the country and somehow has become rather disconnected from the first day of Spring with a few sock burning events starting in early March and other slipping into May and early June, being tied more to the solstice than the equinox.  Perhaps the moral of the story is that any warm day is a good day to burn your socks.