By Austin Price, Staff Writer
Our next Christmas tradition is one of my personal favorites: the wearing of Ugly Christmas sweaters. Ugly Christmas sweaters didn’t actually start out so ugly. The original ugly Christmas sweaters were never intended to be ugly; they were actually pretty artistic and joyful. They were first known as “Jingle Bell Sweaters” and featured discrete Christmas themed decorations. However, as the years went by, these sweaters became more commercialized and took on a different meaning.
This silly, iconic tradition really gained steam in the 1980s. According to writer Valeria Santalla, “the character that popularized weird sweaters with strange patterns was Cliff Huxtable from The Cosby Show. By the end of the decade, it was common for conductors of Christmas special shows to wear them.” Despite their fame, ugly Christmas sweaters lost their iconic status in the 1990s. Ugly Christmas sweaters did not make a substantial comeback until the character Mark Darcy got shamed in the 2001 film “Bridget Jones’s Diary” with one of the most outrageous sweaters ever worn on screen.
After the film’s release, ugly Christmas sweaters made a full recovery thanks to some help from our neighbors in Canada. According to the “Ugly Christmas Sweater Party Book,” the sweaters became a party trend in Vancouver, Canada in 2001. It was in Vancouver that Chris Boyd and Jordan Birch launched the first Christmas Sweater Party. This solidified the infamous ugly Christmas sweater tradition, gaining so much attention that a designated day was put in place to celebrate it. The official day to wear your ugly sweater is National Ugly Christmas Sweater Day on December 21.