Last year around this time, Jason hit us with a Griswoldian gem of an ugly Christmas sweater that had its own kind of charm. The Griswold sweater Even if you’re not familiar with the National Lampoon “Vacation” series of movies and the Griswold family, you still get it. All of us know a Clark Griswold type that goes a little over the top in celebrating the season.

This week, Jason threw out a bigger challenge. Look at the sweater in the photo and see if you can make sense of it, beyond its sheer ugliness. If you look closely, you see that it does qualify as a Christmas sweater (Merry X-Mix?). It is undeniably ugly, so it checks off the two requirements for being an ugly Christmas sweater. It’s a (I believe unintentional) masterpiece of this ironic genre, and so Jason hands-down wins this year and will undoubtedly go unopposed for the title. (As an aside, Shmedley and I  noticed during our daily morning meeting that the sweater is almost long enough to be considered a mini-dress, but we made sure Jason kept his pants on just in case he wanted to test the theory.)

The Question(s)

I believe that this sweater was conceived before the advent of the celebration of ugly Christmas sweaters, during a time when people were making lots of stuff that your aunt could buy you when she didn’t know what to get you for Christmas. So I’m looking for help here.

My questions are simple. Why? Not, why did Jason “don he now this gay apparel, fa-la-la, la-la-la, la-la-la”.  We already covered that. Instead, why did someone conceive of this and then convince someone else to produce it? Why? And what is it anyway?

Is the cat some well-known cartoon character? What about the floppy disks and the DJ mix console? What is it? Is there a brilliant joke hidden in there somewhere? Or am I just over reading it and it’s just a hallucinogenic idea conceived by someone with too much time on their hands? Please help!

So, with apologies to Andy Williams for the title of this post, if you can shed some light, please feel free to add your interpretation in the comments below. We have to know why!