Oh The Sweaters Outside Are Frightful…

Beware of old ladies in Christmas sweaters this time of year. Seriously. Women of a certain age who sport these yuletide monstrosities fit a very particular psychological profile and it’s best to just avoid confrontation and eye contact. It takes a pathologically aggressive personality to don knitwear with reindeer and snowmen over leggings and deem it suitable for public. Matching earrings or brooches are optional, but should serve as a warning that this grandma is particularly badass. It’s an act of fashion aggression that matches their self-centered, f@ck you attitude. They’re the ladies who cut in front of you line at the mall, steal your parking space and yell at your children in the store.

They can be a public nuisance and it’s best to avoid any checkout lines at the grocery store with Xmas sweater wearers because you can guarantee they’ll hold up the line with a terrifying assortment of expired coupons or harangue the checker with some complaint . Sure, they may look doughy and harmless enough but beware of their bright red, acrylic talons. Once they get you in their arthritic grip, there’s no escape.

On the plus side, you can see them coming a mile away and avoid unpleasant encounters by being vigilant. Last night, my husband and I took the boys out to dinner at Mogo’s Mongolian Barbeque. This has to be one of my favorite restaurants in the Valley. It’s a family-operated restaurant in a strip mall with ugly 70’s decor. But the food is an all-you-can eat buffet of meat and vegetables that you assemble yourself and give to the cook who stir fries it over an enormous circular steel drum of a stove. The place has a homey, kitschy charm and attracts a hardcore group of regulars who wait outside the doors for the restaurant to open. Once you place your order, you help yourself to the assortment of sauces, meats and veggies to assemble your stir fry.

My hubby and I usually take turns to go up since we have the children to attend to at the table and the line at the stove isn’t too bad as long as you get there early enough. I hadn’t gotten up to get my food yet but wasn’t in a particular hurry since nobody was up ahead of me. Suddenly, a group of middle aged women walked in and my husband immediately looked up and said quickly, “Women wearing Christmas sweaters, better get up there.” Sure enough, they didn’t even bother to sit down at a table to place their order and started rushing the food. A waitress had to run after them to take their order, but they didn’t pause. They kept walking and barked out their order as the waitress trotted next to them breathlessly scribbling into her notepad . Luckily, the waitress proved to be a momentary diversion and I managed to slip past them to get my food. But it was close. Like bears, they may look big and clumsy and cuddly, but when fighting over food, they can be surprisingly fast and fierce.

So I thought I’d raise awareness about the Xmas Sweater Mafia and perform a valuable public service. But when the holidays are over and the last sweater abomination is packed away in mothballs, I’m afraid we’re all on our own to identify these sociopaths lurking amongst us. Intrigued by this sweater phenomenon, I tried to research more about the history of the Xmas Sweater, but found very little about the origins. However, I did turn up this little entry at wikipedia:

 Holiday sweaters contain a (sometimes cheesy) Christmas or New Year’s related design. Patterns for holiday sweaters can be found dating from as far back as the turn of the century, but they only became common after the Second World War - before that time women didn’t wear patterned sweaters at all (before ca. 1918 women rarely wore sweaters except as jackets/coats) and men who wore sweaters generally wore either traditional patterns or plain sweaters. Before 1945 most people couldn’t afford a special sweater just for one season, either - most people had two or three changes of clothing at most. Knitters spent most of their time on socks, mitts, and other necessary cold-weather accessories.

What happened after the Second World War is that the wool manufacturing industry had to find a way to sell wool. Manufacturers had built huge factories for carding and sorting wool and producing fibers in order to fill the demand for uniform cloth during the war, but the larger wardrobes being purchased by returning veterans and their families contained a lot of items made of the new synthetic fabrics. So as not to take a huge loss on the facilities built during the war, manufacturers retooled to a small extent and started producing much larger amounts of yarn than they previously had. In order to sell this, they promoted sweaters as a fashion statement and prompted the development of commercial knitting facilities. They also produced thousands of pattern books for the home knitter and crocheter. These pattern books proliferated and things like holiday sweaters, novelty socks, crocheted toilet roll covers (anybody remember those at Grandma’s house?) and even ‘peter heaters’ (I kid you not; my mother, may she rest in peace, had a pattern. And yes, it had sizes S-M-L-XL.) Basically, if you could knit it there was a pattern for it. It was in this flurry of knitting frenzy that the holiday sweater became an entrenched part of the Anglo-American holiday period. Later on in the 70s when hand knitting became ‘old-fashioned’ and ‘fuddy-duddy’, it became more common to buy the holiday sweater. Nowadays it’s all back.

Source: my mother’s 363460989843 knitting books. –Charlene 09:24, 11 March 2007 (UTC)