How Ugly Christmas Sweaters Became A ‘Generation’s Mistletoe’

ACROSS AMERICA — Are you under pressure this holiday season to find a hideously kitschy Christmas sweater, ideally made of questionable fabric and adorned with battery-operated lights and ornaments that jingle?

Have you ever wondered how ugly Christmas sweaters even became a thing? Are they ugly, or merely festive? Do they violate fire codes?

We have so, so many questions.

As the holiday became increasingly secular and commercialized in the 1950s, novelty sweaters were added to a growing list of things people didn’t know they needed to show their cheerfulness. Although hardly garish by today’s standards, Val Doonican and Andy Williams wore “jingle bell sweaters,” as they were originally called, as they crooned Christmas songs on their television specials.

If you’re a hater and regard these holiday-themed garments on par with your Great Aunt Edith’s fruitcake, don’t blame your great-grandparents’ idols. But if you’re a fan of this exuberant expression of holiday cheer, thank Doonican and Williams for being ahead of their time. Their fashion didn’t really catch on, though.

The modern iteration of the ugly Christmas sweater returned to pop culture in the 1980s when they showed up in holiday episodes of “The Cosby Show,” “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” and other holiday entertainment.

In “Christmas Vacation,” Clark Griswold (Chevy Chase) wore an understated, subtly cool Christmas sweater, helping to bring the holiday-themed garment back into the mainstream in the late 1980s. (The sweater isn’t nearly as hilarious as the scene in which the garment, covered in sticky pine needles, becomes stuck to Clark’s face and hands when he attempts to take it off.)

Like all fashion trends, the popularity of the ugly Christmas sweater ebbs and flows. The garment fell from favor in the 1990s, when they were looked down upon as something only old Great Aunt Edith would wear when she showed up at the door with her fruitcake.

The holiday clothing statement returned with what appears to be staying power in the early aughts. National Ugly Christmas Sweater Day (Friday, Dec. 16) even started showing up on national day calendars that list dozens of things to celebrate even if you do not get a day off from work to do it.

Colin Firth, playing the lawyer Mark Darcy in 2001’s “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” wore a sweater with a goofy-looking reindeer, much to the comic disdain of Bridget (Renée Zellweger). The sweater had to be just right and went through several iterations, Sharon Maguire, the director of all three films in the Bridget Jones franchise, told USA Today in 2016.

“The character of Mr. Darcy is a constipated English prig when we first meet him, so we needed something totally ridiculous to pierce that pomposity,” Maguire said, adding that neither Santas nor Christmas trees “worked as well as that red-nosed moose or reindeer we chose.”

“First versions of the moose were too small and too subtle. The moose eyes weren't dopey enough. The horns weren’t large or waggly enough, either. It also had to work for the camera,” she said. “It’s a reveal, so the top of the sweater had to be plain and make Darcy look kinda cool on Bridget’s first appearance. Although it's impossible to look cool in a turtleneck sweater when you're over 17 and not a model.”

Val Doonican and Andy Williams wouldn’t recognize — and perhaps wouldn’t appreciate— the holiday-themed sweaters of today. They’ve gotten raunchier, pushing the boundaries of good taste, as time has gone on, according to a 2019 story originally published by The Washington Post.

On Google, a search for “ugly Christmas sweaters” yields 32.2 million results. Some do light up. They relay cheesy puns. They bear the names of celebrities and brands. There’s even something called the “Corn Ugly Christmas Sweatshirt.”

They have become so popular that dogs wear them. The Chicago French Bulldog Rescue group just closed the books on its 2022 Ugly Sweater Holiday Party, an event to raise money for dogs that need medical care. It’s so popular it usually raises about $150,000 in donations.

Finding ugly Christmas sweaters used to require hours of combing through thrift shops. Big-box and fast-fashion retailers got on board, first, and even luxury fashion houses, such as Givenchy and Dolce & Gabbana, and Nordstrom and other high-end retailers are grabbing a piece of the multi-million-dollar ugly Christmas sweater industry.

The hosts of the first-known ugly Christmas sweater party, held in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 2002, must be proud. Their aim was to make the ugly Christmas sweater a pinnacle of modern ironic taste, according to the “Ugly Christmas Sweater Party Book: The Definitive Guide to Getting Your Ugly On.”

“It’s hard to say what triggered the change in perspective,” Brian Miller, one of the book’s authors and founder of the online shop UglyChristmasSweaterParty.com, told CNN Style last year. “But I think that the moment someone wore the garment in a humorous way, people started seeing the comic side of it, and thinking ‘this thing at the back of the closet could be fun, instead of something awful that nobody wants,’ ” he said.

He called the ugly Christmas sweater “our generation’s mistletoe,” and said it has reached “it” status.

“When I attended my first Ugly Sweater Party in the early 2000s, I would have never anticipated the garment would take off like this,” Miller told CNN. “Although it's easy to see why: ugly knits can be worn by anyone — from my daughter at her school’s ugly sweater contest to office workers at their end of year party. They’re democratic. And they’re a lot of fun. Christmas can be quite stressful — wearing something ridiculous can help take the pressure off.”

Also, depending on how many kitschy things you add, ugly Christmas sweaters may, in fact, be a fire hazard.