I bought an ugly sweater. An ugly Christmas sweater. With a hood!
I don’t know if the ugly sweater thing is done. It seems like it might be kind of done. But on the other hand, we’re talking about a holiday with traditions that are old as fuck. So who’s to say what’s outdated and what’s still rad?
It came from an ugly sweater store, a pop-up store in a little brick building next to the Whole Foods. Whole Foods is, in some ways, a hellish place, but goddamn if they didn’t make me BELIEVE in orange juice again.
I saw the store, and what the hell, it’s the perfect next thing for my Xmas Snowdown, if nothing else.
The door jingles, and the lady working there says, “Oh, man. You just missed it. I just let the air out of the inflatables. Turned the music off.” She was right on the edg of closing, but she was happy for me to look around. Which I can say for sure because when I offered to leave, she said, “No, no. Here. The men’s sweaters are here. New sweaters. Used sweaters. Naughty sweaters are on that rack back there.”
I spent the next few minutes pretending to look through the regular sweaters, debating in my head how long I should wait before making a beeline to the naughty sweaters. Which were fairly disappointing. A snowman with a carrot in the wrong spot. Mrs. Clause in some bondage gear. Reindeer fucking. Somehow they sound great when I write them down here…you know, the problem was it was all so intentional. They looked like, you know those Big Johnson t-shirts that townie guys used to wear all time? I think the Big Johnson factory maybe went out of business and started making naughty Christmas stuff.
I asked the lady how she got in the ugly Christmas sweater business, and she told me a vague story about how she worked somewhere and saw that people were buying ugly Christmas sweaters. Step two, based on her story, was washing 4,000 sweaters at a laundromat. How she actually acquired them she didn’t say, and I wonder if it’s a trade secret.
A couple other people came in the store, and the lady gave in, went into the back and turned on the Christmas music. When she came back out, I realized how much of her story was rote. Men’s sweaters here, new sweaters, used sweaters, naughty sweaters.
What makes me a good person, I managed to wait longer than these people to investigate the naughty sweaters.