Leave your Santa snood in the closet
By Robin Givhan
Washington Post
There is little good that can be said about Christmas-themed dressing, a category of anti-style so appalling that by January one cannot look at a simple red sweater without it jarring like a shot of sour egg nog.
Even the typically tasteful find their keen eye for dress blurred by liquored-up chocolate truffles and over-soaked baba au rhum: They reach for red even though it's not their color or scramble to find the wreath brooch that a Secret Santa gave them a few years ago, and wonder if anyone will notice that it's missing several rhinestones.
Gregory Yamamoto • The Honolulu Advertiser
What is this silly pressure to dress like a Christmas tree, Mrs. Kringle or Bing Crosby?
Folks spend so much time decorating the home, the yard, the cookies. Surely that is enough. There is no need to sprinkle glitter in the decolletage, wrap garland around a ponytail or blinking lights around the neck.
These are not signs of festivity or a measure of one's enthusiasm for a party. It is excess. It is wretched. It is naughty, not nice.
And so, there are rules.
• Entire families should not dress in Santa sweaters. They should not gather in front of the hearth for a family portrait, and such a portrait should never find its way into a greeting card.
• Santa sweaters are not cute, and the long ones that fit over the hips — the ones that Mother invariably pairs with black leggings — make your butt look big.
• No adult should ever be seen in public wearing a Santa hat unless standing in front of a Salvation Army collection bucket ringing a bell.
• Santa, the elves and the reindeer should never be co-opted to protest a war — as one Kris Kringle kook did recently to voice her concerns about war in Iraq. That would be akin to dressing up like Frosty the Snowman to persuade bureaucrats to forgive Third World debt.
Or marching on the Mall as the Great Pumpkin in support of Roe v. Wade.
Such costuming has a way of detracting from intelligent debate.
• All novelty ties are ugly. No man should ever wear a tie printed with red and green Christmas lights unless given to him by his children, and if that is the case, he should announce that fact immediately upon entering a room.
• No manager should pair a tie covered in Grinch faces with a business suit in an attempt to show his employees that he has holiday spirit; it will only alert them to the fact that he has bad taste and poor judgment.
• During the Christmas season it is the thought that counts, so take care to think long and hard before tucking that mistletoe into your hair or pinning it to your lapel. It is never the dream date who is sporting the mistletoe but rather the guy with the sweaty palms who wears his pants too high and the woman who teases her hair and refers to her bras and panties as "foundation garments." Who do you want to be?
• Christmas underwear and pajamas are fine, mostly because no one will see them, and the few who do theoretically love you anyway. But remember that even your mother doesn't want to see you in red longjohns with a trapdoor.
• Christmas socks are questionable. They straddle the line between private silliness and public ridiculousness. But if the truth be told, they are best left dangling from the mantel waiting to be stuffed.
