I have a feature request to be added to SO: I think that when you win a hat, or maybe just a few special hats, the hats should be sent to your house for you to keep.
When I was looking at the Winter Bash 2017, I saw that there was a hat designing contest. I thought that when you did the achievement to get a hat, you actually got it; I was totally motivated to go and earn some hats. But later on, I was talking to a friend about how cool it is that you can win real hats, but he said you don't actually get them, they just appear on your profile picture.
That's great and all, but I think that SO should take hats one step further and actually give away hats. Wouldn't that be awesome, walking around with a SO hat? Then you could take your profile picture actually wearing the hat, too.
Shipping away real hats might cost SO a lot of money, so maybe there could just be a few, harder to achieve hats. Or, maybe a mastery hat of like over 10k rep or something. Or a real hat that you earn only if you have every single virtual hat unlocked.
EDIT: This is a different feature request/question than How to earn Stack Exchange swag or goodies?. This is a feature request for a different type of swag/goodies, not a question on how to earn swag/goodies.