It’s Open Season on Christmas Sweaters
Much like wearing white shoes before Memorial Day, it was once pretty much a rule that nothing Christmas could appear on your person or in your home before the end of the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade — or better yet, Thanksgiving Day itself. Once we hit Black Friday, all the Christmas carols — and Christmas seasonal attire — can come out of the closet (at least until New Year’s Eve).
Christmas sweaters from the time of my youth were plain sweaters in Christmas colors, maybe with a candy-cane-colored ribbing or cable. Graphical and pictorial Christmas sweaters were hand-knit labors of love, requiring the management of stitch markers and multiple bobbins of colored yarns. While the concept seemed more geared towards children, the rate at which they grow suggests that a Christmas sweater given this year would have had to have been knitted large enough to fit the child the following year. (Imagine having to wait almost a whole year to wear your Christmas gift!)
Being Jewish and growing up in a Jewish-majority town in the Northeastern US, I knew of only one street in the town where more than one family put up more than one string of Christmas lights, and I generally didn’t pay too much attention to Christmas-specific attire. I don’t remember seeing (or paying attention to?) the pictorial Christmas sweaters in department stores until the late 1980s or early 1990s. According to a co-worker at the time, those sweaters were popular in her upper-class Presbyterian church; congregants would wear a different Christmas sweater to church each Sunday in December.
My first introduction to people who dressed their entire homes for Christmas was the first time my partner took me home (to his Virginia Beach family) for Christmas. Every aunt and cousin had a Christmas village of miniature houses, Christmas-themed candy dishes, show towels, and sometimes even tableware.
Several of these relatives had Christmas-themed tops or house-dresses that they’d wear Christmas Day, or even as late as New Year’s Eve (although it seems as if most of them trashed or donated those tops after the holiday season — I never saw the same one twice). Rather than pictorial sweaters, most of these were embroidered sweatshirts, ribbon-decorated tops, or just red-and-green house dresses or loungewear. It was from their example that I started accumulating Christmas-themed clothing for the season. While some of my tops were purchased, some were the sort of craft-yourself designs I found in the seasonal-inspiration and -crafting books and magazines that were common throughout the 1990s.
But every style has its ups and downs, its lifecycle, its saturation point. Less than a decade later, some arbiters of style (or social decorum) decided the market had become inundated with pictorial Christmas attire, and started calling these “Ugly Christmas Sweaters”. (Agreed, some of these sweaters had rather questionable color schemes and/or illogical subject arrangements, but none were truly ugly.) Other people leaned into this concept and started deliberately making their sweaters “ugly” by adding things like fringe, non-Christmas-adjacent subjects, irrelevant-to-Christmas decorations, and battery-operated lights, making them truly “over the top”.
It seems that the pendulum has swung a bit closer to center and a bit down-market: Christmas-themed sweaters are once again available — but mostly in craft stores like Michaels, in cut-rate department stores like Target, and on cybermarkets like Amazon.com.
Love them (and wear them) or hate them (and make fun of them), it’s your choice. And since we’ve now safely passed the Thanksgiving Day social barrier, it’s Open Season on Christmas sweaters.