Public Media for Central Pennsylvania
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

It's Ugly Christmas Sweater Season — Share Your Best (Bad) Attire

Consignment shop owner Michael Oaks stockpiled more than a thousand ugly Christmas sweaters for the holiday rush — and he's already started begging for more.
Eleanor Klibanoff
/
NPR
Consignment shop owner Michael Oaks stockpiled more than a thousand ugly Christmas sweaters for the holiday rush — and he's already started begging for more.

Looking for a stylish sweater for the holidays? Forget cashmere. Instead, go for the light-up, dancing Santa.

This season, holiday shoppers are demanding the ugliest, gaudiest, tackiest sweaters out there. They need them for ugly sweater parties, ugly sweater fun runs — even an ugly sweater party cruise.

All that demand has had an impact on stores large and small. On the national level, Wal-Mart, Kohl's and Target all sell vintage-looking sweaters with all the bells and tinsel you could want.

And at Re-Love It consignment in Purcellville, Va., last year, shop owner Michael Oaks had 120 sweaters that quickly sold. This year, he stockpiled more than a thousand for the Christmas rush.

His customers on a recent day included a Southwest flight attendant shopping for the perfect sweater to wear over her uniform — "it's gotta be really, really gaudy," she says — and holiday party-goers who hope to out-tacky their competition.

So far, Oaks has sold 800 sweaters — and he just received an emergency shipment of 200 more.

Share Your Tacky Sweater: #NPRuglysweaters

Do you have the perfect ugly holiday sweater? Can you out-tacky Re-Love It owner Michael Oaks?

Post your photos with the tag #NPRuglysweaters on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook, and we'll pull together some of the highlights for a post Sunday night.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Eleanor Klibanoff was WPSU's reporter for Keystone Crossroads, a statewide reporting collaboration that covers the problems and solutions facing Pennsylvania's cities. Previously, Eleanor was a Kroc Fellow at NPR in DC. She worked on the global health blog and Weekend Edition, reported for the National desk and spent three months at member station KCUR in Kansas City. Before that, she covered abortion politics in Nicaragua and El Salvador, two of the seven countries in the world that completely ban the procedure. She's written for Atlanta Magazine, The Nicaragua Dispatch and Radio Free Europe.
Eleanor Klibanoff