One of my favorite parts of transitioning into the holiday season is reintroducing my Christmas sweater into my wardrobe rotation. I’m excited to finally wear it again this week.

Sweaters make me happy. They’re like day-long hugs from your closet.

I’ve promised myself to never wear my Christmas sweater outside of the time span between Thanksgiving and Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Anything outside of that window is grandstanding.

It is not explicitly a Christmas sweater. It isn’t tacky and doesn’t have Santas or reindeer or baby Jesuses mixed into the pattern, but the black-and-red color scheme and prominent snowflakes clearly mark it as an early-winter-holiday themed sweater. I definitely wouldn’t wear it as late as Valentine’s Day; that would be absurd.

I’m not a splashy guy. My favorite color is gray (for many reasons, but chiefly because of the anxiety I get when spelling it wondering if I should use an “a” or an “e”) so I don’t have a very wide range of sweater options. I got this sweater after realizing my entire collection consisted of three gray sweaters and two brown ones.

At the same time, I bought a button-up blue sweater with a big puffy collar. It felt like wearing a blanket and I was very pleased with it until I wore it to work one day and saw a co-worker wearing nearly an identical sweater.

I don’t mind blending in with the crowd (after all I do own three gray sweaters), but this co-worker was a sixty-two-year-old woman and she totally wore it better with a matching brooch. This year it went into our Goodwill pile.

My Christmas sweater is unmistakably masculine in a quiet, confident way. It taps into my free-wheeling side in a socially acceptable style, spreads cheer and makes people smile.

A relative once called it my ugly Christmas sweater, which hurt. Not my sense of fashion, but my pride as a humorist. Ugly Christmas sweaters are the Budweiser “wuzz-up” of fashion; I’m far too sophisticated to fall into that trap.

I understand the impulse. We all want to spread joy around the holidays, but many of us also have residual social stigmatization fears from our teenage years.

Rather than applying the effort to find a splash of color that fits into the scene, many choose a design that so comically clashes with their surroundings that it shields them from criticism. It’s a safe play. I don’t fault anyone for doing it, but it isn’t a good fit for me.

That’s why I love my Christmas sweater so much. It strikes just the right note between festive and mundane. People notice it, but it doesn’t force itself on anyone. It’s like elevator music you can wear.

I’ve been so encouraged by the reaction to my Christmas sweater that I’m currently in the market for a moose sweater, which would be a little less holiday-oriented allowing me to incorporate a splash of color into February and March.

This would be a major risk for me, but with the right muted tones, I think I could successfully pull it off. Jenny strongly disagrees, but that’s just because we haven’t found the right moose sweater yet.

Finding the right moose sweater is very personal. You can’t farm it out to a Google search or to your Amazon shopping cart. A true sweater sportsman finds his moose in the wild.

I found a pretty good one earlier this fall but didn’t buy it because it was blue and I knew that I would exclusively wear it with jeans.

I loathe the pretentiousness of the formalwear moose-sweater crowd. It’ll be a cold day in Kohls before you ever find me wearing a moose sweater with slacks.

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