Our world lacks mittens. As a little kid, all you ever had to wear on your hands was mittens. They were the perfect tool for packing snowballs—all you had to do was scoop up a big load of snow and start pushing your hands together. As we get older, we seem to think mittens are for children and suddenly, all we want to wear is gloves. Now equipped with independent finger movement, the snow has eight more ways to get out of your hands, creating smaller and smaller snowballs. I guess that’s why you don’t see many senior citizen snowball fights.

Mittens, despite all the apparent disadvantages of the restricted finger movement, are truly a thing of wonder. Gloves are a great idea, wrapping each finger individually with fabric, until you get them wet. Now your hands are covered completely with wet fabric, completely eliminating any chance of transferring warmth between your fingers. Mittens, on the other hand, can get as wet as you want them and still you get to keep all that nice finger heat to yourself!

As if increased finger temperature wasn’t enough to convince the world to change to mittens, the increased attractiveness factor should be. When was the last time you didn’t get a smile on your face when you saw somebody wearing mittens? Granted, you may only see mittens in their natural habitat when children are outside playing, but the fact remains: mittens are cute. Test the theory yourself. Put a mitten on your hand and bend your fingers. A simple, cute, good-bye wave. Now take the mitten off. Now you just look like somebody trying to clap with one hand. Point proven? I thought so.

Mittens are the most under-appreciated accessory in today’s winter arsenal of warmth. Boots, scarves, coats, socks, gloves, stocking caps, even long underwear get a higher approval rating than mittens. But how many times have you heard of nursery rhyme kittens missing out on food because they couldn’t find their long underwear?

Take into account the increased workforce that could be devoted to mitten production and we could quite easily improve the world economy. Figure the world population at a conservative estimate of six billion people. Assume one billion people live in a mitten-necessitating environment and you are looking at a lot of mittens. Assume the mitten wearers need an average of three pairs of mittens per person and you have nearly six billion individual mittens to produce. At ten dollars a pair, that is thirty billion dollars of economic growth, due wholly to people wearing mittens.

The national and international implications of mitten-wearing are far reaching. If all United Nations meetings were held outside, in Canada, and everybody had to wear mittens, we would quickly eliminate the time-consuming bickering and accusations that plague our international community. Imagine the difficulty our international leaders would have arguing with each other if they had to point fingers with their entire hand. International diplomacy and world peace may very well rest in the palm of a mitten-clad hand.

It is now time to rise up in revolt. Throw down your gloves, slip on your mittens and prepare to fight, my loyal warriors. We have little to fear because we have the children on our side, and the children are our future. Go out, buy a pair of mittens and go out and play. See how nice it feels to make a perfect snowball. And when your hands get cold, just rub your fingers together, think about world peace and all the jobs you helped create, and I promise that you will feel warm and fuzzy inside.