Dressed for excess The uglier the better when it comes to Christmas sweaters
Snowmen decorate one of the ugly Christmas sweaters Murphy sells on Etsy.
Ugly Sweater Store is a website that sells used and thrifted Christmas sweaters.
Faces of Santa decorate one of the ugly Christmas sweaters Murphy sells on Etsy.
Ugly Sweater Store, a website that sells used and thrifted Christmas sweaters, sells a variety of tacky and gaudy apparel.
Pamela Murphy of Centerville displays some of the “ugly” Christmas sweaters she sells in her online Etsy shop. One of her cats, Crystal, quietly examines some of them.
Matt Latimer, 32, of South Strabane Township, celebrates the holiday season by wearing a tacky Christmas vest, topped off with a Santa hat.
If somewhere in your musty attic you find a bag of embellished and sequined Christmas sweaters from the 1980s, the bad news is they are no longer “in style.”
The good news: They are all the rage. Thanks to the craze of “ugly Christmas sweater parties,” where partygoers don their gaudy apparel, holiday slipovers are being snatched up from thrift stores quicker than you can say “yuletide.”
And they aren’t always cheap, either. Ugly Christmas sweaters have emerged as their own market – a trend that businesses and even local thrifters are capitalizing on.
Pamela Murphy, 59, of Centerville, runs an online vintage Christmas shop on www.etsy.com, where she sells “tacky” nutcracker earrings, snowman brooches and, of course, ugly sweaters.
“Last year I sold a whole bunch of them,” Murphy said. “I had one, it had like feather boa stuff around the wrists and fuzzy stuff hanging all over it. It actually made my eyes water.”
Due to their popularity, ugly Christmas sweaters have become a rare find in thrift stores. Many customers are willing to pay thrifters like Murphy to do their shopping for them.
Murphy charges anywhere between $24 and $50 for a vintage sweater, substantially more than thrift shop prices.
“Last year in January, I went and cleaned out the Goodwills of all their ugly Christmas sweaters,” Murphy said. “People are going after them now. People want them.”
Ugly Christmas sweater parties have proven to be a huge hit at bars and restaurants. Beechie’s Place in Meadow Lands is hosting its fourth annual sweater party Dec. 20, starting at 5 p.m.
“Honestly, I started doing them when I was in college. It was something that we always did,” said Beechie’s owner Lane McFarland, a 2010 graduate of Westminster College.
He said it’s not entirely new because his parents used to attend ugly Christmas sweater parties in their 20s, but to them, “they were just parties,” without any irony or self-deprecating humor attached.
Customers of all ages get in on the fun – and employees, too. One 60-year-old employee wears holiday sweaters knitted by his mother.
“He wore one throughout the entire three weeks leading up to Christmas, and every time he came in, he had a different one on,” McFarland said.
McFarland has seen some creative, handmade sweaters, including one that featured a light-up Christmas tree and a teddy bear that sang.
“The customers every year try to out-do us,” he said. “Every year it gets a little better.”
Matt Latimer, 32, of South Strabane Township, used to throw an ugly Christmas sweater party every year when he lived in Boston.
“I think it just kind of gives it more of a casual vibe,” he said of the themed parties. “A lot of Christmas parties and company parties, its pretty much suit and tie or cocktails and kind of fancy … This just sets a pretty cool tone, and it’s comfortable.”
He said sweater-wearers typically fall into one of two camps: vintage or crafty.
Some party-goers show up with funky ’80s sweaters. Others dazzle the room with sweaters that have strings of Christmas lights and garland attached – even snowmen fashioned from cotton balls.
“You can kind of get out of control,” he joked. “It was always a great time.”
But Latimer, an ugly sweater purist, said it’s a no-no to show up at a party with the same sweater two years in a row.
“If you’re a true ugly Christmas sweater party-goer, you have to get a new one every year,” he said. “So every year it had to be something different, and the more tacky, the more embellished, the better.”
That is also the mantra of Mike Golomb, who deals in the business of tacky, gaudy and downright hideous. His online business, www.uglysweaterstore.com, features hundreds of holiday horrors – all one-of-a-kind and ugly in their own way.
One of Golomb’s personal favorites is a sweater that “looks like Santa threw up on it.” It displays a dozen Christmas patriarchs with beaded belts and embellished beards.
On another sweater, Santa is wearing a tropical muumuu and riding a surfboard in the ocean, which is being pulled by a school of dolphins. Naturally.
“A lot of them are pretty ridiculous,” he said, but added, “Ugly is in the eye of the beholder.”
Golomb’s online store has been around for six years, and he doesn’t see the trend going away anytime soon. Rather, his team started expanding its merchandise and now sells ugly Christmas suits and trophies to hand out to the eyesore of the party.
“It’s really gotten bigger and bigger, and it’s covering all age categories now,” he said. “It’s like a second Halloween.”
No word yet on ugly Halloween sweater parties – but Golomb’s shop already sells a few dozen, and there are 10 months to start planning.