A holiday gift to make you say ‘Ugg’

S.J. CAHN

In the fourth and fifth grades, I never wore long pants.

Neither did any of my friends.

Throughout 1978 and 1979, we cavorted about the campus of

Manhattan Beach’s Grandview Elementary School in the uniform of the

day: OP shorts.

Those corduroys, which were painfully short with narrow legs,

eventually turned up across the country during the early to mid-1980s

surf culture boom.

By then, we beach kids had moved on to some other outfit, which

didn’t set the world on fire or even lodge itself firmly in my

memory.

But how I remember those shorts. And I should repeat: It’s all we

wore. I, literally, never wore anything but shorts to school for two

whole years.

Those OPs were the first piece of fashion I was privy to way

before they landed on the popular landscape.

This holiday season, another fashion familiar to Southern

California beaches is the hot buy of the year: Ugg boots.

They’ve appeared on “Oprah,” “Sex and the City” and in the New

York Times. They’re selling at marked-up prices on EBay. They are

seriously hard to find, especially in pinks and blues and beiges.

Debi Cline, who owns the Fashion Island store Sheep Dogs with her

husband, Kim, told me: “It’s been pretty crazy.”

Ugg boots are definitely “the one that everyone seems to be

looking for,” she said, though at this point there are similar brands

that are more readily available.

Like many who surf, I’ve been in the know about these New Zealand

exports, which date back to the 1960s, for years.

My first pair didn’t come as a means to keep my feet warm after a

cold winter surf, however. I asked for them for Christmas in 1987 to

keep my feet warm during a cold winter, my first at college in the

Midwest. (I’d nearly abandoned ship when it snowed -- snowed, mind

you -- on Sept. 30 of my freshman year. For everyone who thinks of

snow as fun for skiing or snowboarding, let me tell you that regular,

old day-in-and-day-out snow isn’t fun. Slogging half-mile to a dining

hall through snow drifts at 7:15 a.m. is the very definition of

misery.)

I had those black Uggs until this past January. They were in sorry

shape, and my wife had bought me a replacement pair (this time for

post-cold winter surfs) for Christmas.

In January, former Independent photographer Sean Hiller and I went

on a surf trip to Baja, Mexico. One morning, when hopping out of my

car to check the waves, my Ugg-enclosed feet landed with a glopping

sound in a patch of thick mud. I pulled my feet out. One of the soles

of my 15-year-old Uggs stayed put.

I suppose I can consider myself lucky that my newer pair are a

year old, because I doubt I’d find them under the tree today. They’re

a little too trendy -- and thus a little too expensive -- to justify

wearing them to the beach or even to consider sliding salty feet

inside them.

But if they last even half as long as my first pair did, I’ll

still be wearing them long after they’ve gone out of style.

Here’s hoping every reader celebrating Christmas today gets the

gift he or she wanted -- trendy, stylish or not.

* S.J. CAHN is the managing editor. He may be reached at (949)

574-4233 or by e-mail at s.j.cahn@latimes.com.