National Ugly Christmas Sweater Day

Specimen: the ugly Christmas sweater. Associated with the 1980s, the ugly Christmas sweater is a heavy knit sweater featuring loud Christmas designs and colors, as if you put all of your Christmas into one piece of wearable wool. It’s like a Cosby sweater meets Santa meets your first-grade teacher.

While unfashionable, ugly Christmas sweaters have a lot of ironic charm. So much so that holiday parties, where guests wear their ugly sweaters, have been thrown since the early 2000s. Each year, stores even sell ugly sweaters in case guests don’t have relics from their past collecting mothballs in their closets.

WWD

And so National Ugly Christmas Sweater Day was started in 2011. It’s included on National Day Calendar, a website that keeps track of all those hyper-specific national days you see online. Each year, the National Ugly Christmas Sweater Day hashtag trends on social media while popular publications and media celebrate the ugly Christmas sweater.

The National Ugly Christmas Sweater Day website launched in 2012. It lists shops where one can get their own ugly sweater for the holiday. The website partners with the charity Save the Children for their “Make the World Better with a Sweater” campaign.