“There is a remarkable breakdown of taste and intelligence at Christmastime. Mature, responsible grown men wear neckties made out of holly leaves and drink alcoholic beverages with egg yolks and cottage cheese in them.”      P.J. O’Rourke

 

 

 

A weird thing about people is that they’re always looking for an excuse to be weirder.

Take Christmas. You’d think that love, joy and Peace on Earth would be enough to sustain any holiday. But it’s not. It never was. People moved quickly from Wise Men and angels-we-have-heard-on-high to fruitcake, over-sized stockings and a chimney-spelunking philanthropist towed around by a flying caribou with a thousand-watt honker.

Weird.

From there it was a distressingly short trip to Santa Shrek lawn ornaments, musical footwear, “Home Alone 3”, gelatin salad with crushed candy canes in it, White Elephant parties and Black Friday.

Weirder.

Fortunately, most of those strange symptoms of the season can be avoided by the prudent, or at least dismissed by the patient. Not so the Ugly Christmas Sweater. A relative newcomer to modern merrymaking, the retina-searing regalia of the hyper-festive simply won’t be denied. At work, at the grocery store, on a public sidewalk, an Ugly Christmas Sweater will march right up and explode in your face without warning. Whether you love it, or hate it, or love it and hate it, that ubiquitous Yuletide uniform is now as much a part of the holidays as the Grinch and green bean casserole.

So how exactly did we get from Bethlehem to Tacky Town? Happily, it’s not a long narrative journey, although it may be hard for some to hear. Folks who profess to know describe the Ugly Christmas Sweater as an inharmonic convergence of two roughly parallel trends that came of age in the fashion- free 1980s, the same decade that brought you leg warmers, sweatbands and acid-washed jeans.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘Twas the advent of the Christmas Variety Special that set the stage, with white-bread crooners like Andy Williams gathered around a TV hearth purring semi-swinging carols and sporting what were then known as a “Jingle Bell Sweaters”, relatively tame garments of generally Scandinavian artistic derivation. Enter actor and comedian Bill Cosby who, as Cliff Huxtable on the hit sitcom “The Cosby Show”, popularized the wearing of hideous sweaters. The combination of nostalgic themes and stylistic carte blanche proved irresistible, and the Ugly Christmas Sweater quickly rose to dominate year-end ensembles all across a nog-addled nation.

Alas, what goes up must come down, and by the early 1990s the Ugly Christmas Sweater found itself relegated to the retail rag-bin of “gag gifts”, rejected by most in favor of more tasteful holiday attire. There it would languish until well into the New Millenium when it was re-discovered by satire-starved hipsters who found in its trite themes and deliberate démodé to be an oh-so-ironic alternative to flattering apparel. The Ugly Christmas Sweater has been on a sarcastic sleigh ride to the stars ever since, with retail sales of the item increasing as much as 500 percent every year since 2010.

Ugly Christmas Sweater Parties are all the rage, these days. Although a precise genesis may never be known, “The Ugly Christmas Sweater Party Book: The Definitive Guide to Getting Your Ugly On” suggests that the first such unsightly soiree might have been thrown in 2002 by Canadian mock-hounds Chris Boyd and Jordan Birch in Vancouver’s classy Commodore Ballroom. Badly dressed Canooks still rock the Commodore each Christmas, with up to 1,000 paying guests competing to out-kitsch the disco balls.

Should you have occasion to attend an Ugly Christmas Sweater Party but can find nothing suitably unappealing in your wardrobe, commerce is way ahead of you. Although their rich lodes of cast-away Christmas cardigans have been worked for years, thrift shops and resale outlets are still good source of nerdy knitwear. Websites like ButtUglySweaters.com, TipsyElves.com and MyUglyChristmasSweater.com offer a plethora of preposterous pullovers to choose from, and well-heeled hipsters can satisfy their sardonic impulses via high-end haberdashers like Burberry, which will gladly accept up to $600 for a sweater no self-respecting Millennial would be seen wearing on Jan. 2 for any money. Then again, there’s just no substitute for the handmade holiday habit, and the Internet is tailor-made for the bad dresser on a budget. UglyChristmasSweaters.com, for example, is a handy source of information for those wishing to craft their own brand of unbecoming.

So what makes an Ugly Christmas Sweater ugly? More is more. More cheesy imagery, more contrasting colors, more ribbons and bows, more bangles and baubles, gimcracks and gingerbread. You can’t really put too many bells and whistles on an Ugly Christmas Sweater, both bells and whistles being perfectly acceptable embellishments. There’s even a website that details how to create a sweater displaying a full-color, live-action cheery Christmas fire like the one Jimmy Fallon wore on TV using only scraps of fabric, an iPad and entirely too much free time.

Yes, Americans do a lot of bizarre things in the name of Christmas, but it’s not like we have a monopoly on that market. Venezuelans travel to Christmas Mass on roller skates. Ukrainians decorate their Christmas trees with spider webs. Many in South African celebrate with a feast of deep-fried caterpillars, and Japanese spend Christmas Day working through a big tub of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Still, when you think of millions of otherwise rational Americans honoring one of the most important days of the Christian calendar, not to mention the Western World’s most beloved holiday, by expending countless hours, gobs of money and enormous effort on garments quite consciously intended to offend the  sensibilities, well…

That’s just weird.

“Christmas sweaters are only acceptable as a cry for help.”     Andy Borowitz