The Death of Laundry Day

Laundry Day is as American as football, apple pie, and Kraft cheese product.  Some hate it, but I usually enjoy a lazy day of washing all the dirty clothes that have been piling up over the last couple weeks at once, wearing sweatpants and my least favorite pair of underwear (since all the others are being washed) and taking warm clothes out of the dryer (especially in winter).  Laundry Day tends to fall on a Sunday, when there's not a whole lot else going on anyway since most people are sleeping off hangovers, and often gets combined with Grocery Day, when my sweatpants get taken to Publix where masses of fellow college students/Laundry Day celebrants are also shopping in sweatpants and hoodies (and, I imagine, their least favorite underwear).

However, Laundry Day, like football and apple pie and Kraft cheese product, seems to be a purely American phenomenon.  I have discovered that, when you don't own a clothes dryer (like most Europeans, apparently), waiting until the last minute to do all your laundry at once is not a good idea.  Instead of warm freshly dried clothes to fold and put away after a few hours, you end up with 3 days of wet clothes hanging from every nook/corner/rack you can find, 3 days of nothing to wear, and a very humid apartment.  The French have mastered the art of doing a little bit of laundry every day, or at least every few days, so their clothes cycle between dry and wet quite nicely. I haven't quite got the hang of it yet.

My makeshift clothesline on a failed laundry day

The death of Laundry Day as a weekend pastime combined with all the grocery stores being closed on Sundays has left me with a problem of how to spend my Sundays (what else is it for, if not laundry and groceries?).  Now that it's snowing, staying in bed seems to be my best bet.