As the various versions of Memorial Day approach, it’s time once again to examine one of life’s great mysteries: the appropriate schedule for white clothes.

Why should this be so hard? It’s a hard and fast rule: no white before Memorial Day, no white after Labor Day.

Or is it? The whole point of white linen, seersucker and straw is that they’re much cooler than heavy winter clothes. By the time the official Memorial Day rolls around, most of the South has been stifling under temperatures in the high seventies for six weeks. If we had to sit around in alpaca suits until the last weekend of May there’d be nothing alive south of Philadelphia. (Don’t even talk to me about “winter white”, the color formerly known as taupe. It’s a brainchild of the fashion industry cooked up to sell you more shoes, just like the fifty-odd holidays invented by Hallmark to keep you buying cards year round.)

Using Easter as a benchmark doesn’t work either, because even if Easter is actually nice and conducive to cord suits and linen dresses, the week after could easily be barely above the freezing point, and there you’ll be with all of your warm toasty things packed up in mothballs.

The former Confederate states never had a universal Confederate Memorial Day, but almost all of them take place long before the end of May—except two. Virginia (naturally trying to claim that it was the first to have ANY Memorial Day) celebrates the usual, universal one; and Louisiana opts for June 3. I figure the dates are earlier so that people can decently wear seersucker earlier. As for Louisiana—well, it’s always hot there, so it doesn’t make much difference.

Since Maryland has been waffling on a Confederate Memorial Day for a hundred and fifty years (and why shouldn’t it? It waffled badly enough about secession in the first place) I’m claiming South Carolina’s day, May 10, as a good clothing change date.

This is, of course, an entirely self-serving decision. It allows me to wear a snappy new straw hat on Preakness Day.