Knit Wit

In 2002, then-university students Jordan Birch and Chris Boyd tried on tacky penguin sweaters at a Vancouver mall one day, and got a genius idea. Their first ugly Christmas sweater party was a runaway youth culture hit. 

Their blueprint has spread around the world, where annual festivities continued until the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Christmas sweaters weren’t always ugly. In the 1950s, “jingle bell sweaters” were adorned with elegant reindeer and Nordic snowflake patterns. Popularized by squeaky-clean crooner Andy Williams, known as “Mr. Christmas” for his cheery holiday TV specials, the craze was short-lived. But vintage versions kept the concept simmering away in the background.

The fashion pendulum swung back, and the pervasive influence of ’90s minimalism relegated those eye-popping sweaters to dust collectors in our closets. Then in 2001, actor Colin Firth as mild-mannered lawyer Mark Darcy in Bridget Jones’s Diary, somehow made the goofy, red-nosed reindeer sweater that his mom made him wear to a party read as adorable, rather than embarrassing. The message it sent was nostalgic escapism, a balm for the fraught mood of the new millennium. 

Since then, the fast-fashion machine took up the merry theme, churning out spangled, holly-bedecked and Santa- and elf-themed versions around the world by the cargo-hold load — including versions for Hanukkah and Kwanzaa. Today, we live in a whiplash of instant-trend cycles, but the sweetly dorky Christmas sweater is so far out of fashion that it will remain a true Canadian classic.