It’s not mass produced and contains no ‘hilarious’ slogan, rather it’s ill fitting and knitted by your granny
Years ago, you would have been loathe to put on your Christmas jumper that your great-aunt Gertrude made for you out of steel wool and solar panels to add extra, sweat-inducing heat, but in recent years it seems that all and sundry have decided that the faux-ironic Christmas jumper is the perfect thing to wear to the office party, drinks with a mate and sporting occasions from the middle of November through to the end of January.
This particular JOE says no more should this be the case. Not only does the mass-produced Christmas jumper fly in the face of all that the true Christmas jumper itself represents, but it identifies you as one of the uniform-wearing twelve-pub-going army of shrieking fools that invade all our peaceful evenings in the pub every year when December rolls around.
What’s wrong with just going to the pub and having a drink? Why do there need to be all these rules? However, we have digressed. The point is this: the Christmas jumper that we grew to loathe as children and teens has come roaring back, but not in the way which we knew it.
It used to display our favourite cartoon character (if you were lucky), from Snoopy to the Turtles, or maybe the Ghostbusters logo, but now people are wiring up their jumpers to flash lights on and off inside a pub, and the front of it displays an obscene message about what antics they intend to get up to in bed later that night. Was it this that your granny had in mind when she knitted you a barely tolerable jumper with misshapen reindeer on it that had to be worn lest you were seen to be rude?
A lot of effort went in to making those jumpers of years gone by, and they really hit their peak in the 1980s and early 1990s. Look, for instance, at the clobber on Kevin in Home Alone, the Christmas film par excellence.
It was just a big heavy jumper, supposed to keep you warm on the cold nights of December, in particular if you happened to be left behind on a family holiday where everyone went to France without you. You might not think that was the motive, but if your mother is anything like JOE’s, then that was the contingency plan in the back of her mind, always looking at the worst case scenario. It is for this reason that your mittens were also on a string that was run through both sleeves of your jacket.
In reality, while you might remember that you always wore the hilarious Christmas jumper that everyone laughs at ironically and you think you’re wearing ironically, to make an ironic statement, the truth is that, like offsetting penalties in the NFL, they cancel each other out. Repeat first down. No one is laughing, no statement is made, no one is ironic.
If you want irony then wear a cable knit sweater that you made yourself at home in front of the fire. The neck will be too high, the arms will be different lengths and it will still look rubbish, but it will cost you a lot less and teach you skills you may need in the future, like how to cable knit something to repair the holes in your trousers. Those will be some soft-ass knee patches, bro.
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