Weather like that I’m still wearing shorts.
-18 C and a bit of snow here. Bundled up but gloves were sufficient.
Currently 71 F outside Little Rock AR today. That’s unusual. It’s usually 10 or more degrees cooler before Thanksgiving.
Love warm weather. Unfortunately we’re also in tornado alley. 
One thing not mentioned … being easier to make, mittens are generally cheaper in any sewn material. Not having to sew fiddly fourchettes will do that.
Also vastly easier to hand-knit. I’ve never tackled gloves, not feeling I can handle that level of complexity, but I own a pair of mittens I knitted probably 20 years or more ago.
Right. My Mom could knock out a pair of mittens in a day or less. A handy skill to have, when you get winter, and your elementary-school-age kids tend to lose their mittens three or four times a winter.
So Mom also learned to knit the cord that runs from mitten to mitten, through the arms of your parka and across your back. It made it harder to lose them, but not entirely impossible.
Yeah, this wasn’t obvious to me. I mean, it is obvious right as soon as anyone has mentioned that they’re warmer (five people in one big bed will be warmer than five people all individually wrapped in single beds - same with fingers) - but I never really thought about it. I’m not sure I ever had cause to think about it. It gets cold where I live, but maybe not so cold that the advantage of mittens over gloves matters so much as it does in other places in the world.
My Dad grew up in one of the colder parts of the USA (NH). When we were little we always had both gloves and mittens. The gloves were thinnish, usually kid with a cotton lining. Thin enough that you could manage simple things like tying a shoe without taking them off.
For warmth, we then had a pair of mittens (or I sometimes had a muff for dressy events) to put on over the gloves. They were thick nalbind or knitted fabric and went up well past our wrists. It’s an excellent combination, and it’s still weird to me seeing people with these double-stuffed gloves that don’t even allow their fingers to bend. What is the point of that? Might as well wear some nice warm mittens.
My mom often said about socks “anything’s a pair as long as one isn’t a glove”.
Wise woman!
I’d love to work this into a conversation.
I grew up in Alaska, where everyone knew that lined mittens were best in very cold temps. There used to be a survival show on TV that was done in Alaska. They would drop off teams in different places with a certain amount of food, hunting and fishing equipment, etc. In one episode one of the teams decided to hike to where they knew another team was because of reasons. As they started off in bitter cold I told my wife “that guy is going to have some serious problems”. When she asked why I said “because he’s wearing gloves and his hands will freeze before they get there”. I was right. He was in agony in short order and suffered serious frostbite.
The USAF, with bases in Fairbanks AK or Thule Greenland (“a woman behind every tree!”), so they had some pretty good cold weather gear. Canvas & felt mukluks, Parkas with fur-trim hoods, etc. But they had big mittens, which were great too, and the same olive drab wool gloves as the army. The glovers were acceptable for pulling triggers, but not for the manual dexterity née for aircraft maintenance. So the aircrew would wear women’s evening gloves under their mittens. The same ingenuity that saw them throwing Slinkies over tree limbs in Vietnam for radio aerials.
I have RA, and it’s extremely difficult to get my hands in gloves, so mittens it is.
Women’s evening gloves are good. So are “driving gloves”, which are sold in both men’s and women’s sizes. They are usually made of thin kid or deer hide, with a lining of silk, or a very thin knit, or sometimes no lining at all.
They aren’t cheap, though.
Thanks to vitiligo, I wear gloves while outdoors most of the time. I have zero melanin on the backs of my hands.
Kayaking gloves are great for me. Today it was frigid though, and I realized all my gloves are fingerless. Unless I have winter gloves stored elsewhere. Mittens make me feel like a big baby.
If you want to see a dude in 19 degree F weather try on various gloves and mittens in front of a thermal imaging camera… you can!
I have poor circulation, so I love my heavy-duty fleece-lined mittens (what I’d call “ski mitts” or “snowmobile mitts” as a young 'un) in the winter. They came with a set of thin fabric gloves to wear inside them, but I usually don’t bother wearing them both at once.
I’m in MN and the only time I wear gloves (maybe!) is when I go shopping. My hands would be way too cold if I wore gloves while walking the dogs or any other outdoor activity.
I was outdoors yesterday taking out the recycling wheelie bin and doing some shovelling, wearing gloves. Only out for about 20 minutes, but my fingers were cold by the time I came back in. It’s about -15C.