It’s time to bring back the truly ugly Christmas sweater
In case you’ve been preccupied putting elves on shelves or stalking hunky mall Santas, we feel compelled to share this yuletide public service announcement: Tomorrow – Dec. 18 -- is National Ugly Christmas Sweater Day.
Let’s put aside the very legitimate question of why the third Friday of December has been designated a haven for anyone wishing to dress garishly in the name of organized religion, and look at precisely how National Ugly Christmas Sweater Day (NUCSD) is supposed to be celebrated.
According to the NUCSD website, participation requires just three things: buying an ugly Christmas sweater (assuming you don’t already own such a holiday horror), wearing it for the entirety of the day (“No breaks. No copouts. No excuses,” reads the website) and sharing with friends and family -- presumably whilst engaging in your well-planned ocular assault -- news that NUCSD is an actual thing.
While we’re all for made-up-sounding holidays – especially ones that involve covering ourselves in faux tinsel or appliquéd reindeer horns – this strikes us as an awfully low bar for participation. Especially since the NUCSD folks helpfully provide a list of preferred ugly sweater vendors. So here’s an added challenge: If you’re going to go ugly, go full, old-school ugly -- fishhook-in-the-eye, gag-reflex-inducing, blood-pressure-spiking visually offensive.
That’s actually harder than it sounds because, somewhere in the murky post-ironic era of holiday sweater design, “ugliness” got conflated with “bad taste.” The result is a Christmas tree lot’s worth of borderline offensive –but far from visually ugly – imagery plastered across chunky knits including (but far from limited to) fornicating reindeer, zombies vomiting down chimneys, Jesus sporting a conical birthday hat and St. Nick sitting on the toilet with his red knickers around his ankles.
The above designs, and their ilk, are essentially too over-the-top, the wearer’s intentions to offend as hard to miss as Rudolph’s blinking nose on a cloudless night. No, the very best ugly Christmas sweaters come off like well-played practical jokes, unfortunate collisions of color, pattern and picture just believable enough to throw the passer-by into swiftly snowballing doubt. “Are they in on it?” one wonders. “Do they know they’ve been swallowed by something hideous? Or are they oblivious?”
The truly ugly Christmas sweater (UCS) still exists, but, like plucking the perfect Christmas tree from a forest of not-quite-perfect ones, finding the right one for you requires some effort. One option is to travel back in time – via a vintage find – to the era of the pre-ironic UCS. A good starting point here would be Rusty Zipper, a site that specializes in vintage and up-cycled holiday atrocities, many of which have been tie-dyed or decked out with LED lights.
Sometimes true ugliness comes from an unexpected place – like Leann Rimes’ Instagram feed, where the singer posted a photo of herself clad in a sweater depicting a prancing unicorn with a red, Rudolph-like nose radiating beams of cheery red light. It’s a whisper campaign of ugly that floats through the fir trees framing the Rudolph-corn so softly it goes un-noticed until it’s too late. (Unicorn Rudolph by FunQi, $39.95 via stupid.com)
There are, of course, the most high-profile Christmas sweaters of the season – the ones worn by the three not-so-wise men of “The Night Before” – Seth Rogen, Anthony Mackie and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Made by a company called Tipsy Elves, they certainly serve as visual punch line, but they’re really only almost-ugly at best. Only Seth Rogen’s Star of David-emblazoned sweater comes close to conjuring palpable pangs of “Is he serious?” doubt. (The official “The Night Before” movie sweaters, $44.95 each via tipsyelves.com)
It would be hard to call the Los Angeles Lakers’ 2015-2016 NBA season anything but ugly to date, so it’s more than fitting that the team merchandise includes what must be the most atrocious ugly sweater in the league – a seizure-inducing purple and gold design that resembles a family crest hastily assembled under cover of darkness. Unfortunately the Los Angeles Clippers don’t even have an ugly sweater on offer, so fans hoping to ugly up to watch the two teams face off Christmas Day at Staples Center will have to settle for smaller – but equally ugly -- red and blue Clipper slippers. (Los Angles LakersKlew Patches Ugly Sweater, $52.49, Los Angeles Clippers Ugly Sweater Slippers, $17.99, both via fanatics.com
If you’ve got suggestions, feel free to share them in the comments below. It might be too late for this year’s celebration, but with a little bit of luck and some serious searching, the third Friday of next December will get really ugly indeed.
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