You get that email everyone dreads (or secretly loves to receive) stating Friday 13th December 2019 is Christmas jumper day! You must wear your best or funniest festive attire and wander around the office all day looking like a Christmas tree, reindeer, elf or worse – the office embarrassing uncle. Either way after enduring this all day you need to head down the pub after work for some more forced fun. Are you the Christmas grinch? Or the man sized festive elf skipping around all day with baubles flying in your wake?
Make the world better with a sweater
Love it or hate it Christmas jumper day is becoming a bit of a constitution with most enjoying getting involved. Many didn’t know that the initiative was introduced by Save the Children as a yearly charity initiative to help them raise much needed funds. The fundraising day where people are encouraged to ‘make the world better with a sweater’ and make a donation for wearing their festive sweater. There are lots of sites to sign up to get your workplace involved. Over the last 7 years it has been running the campaign has been backed by many celebrities with social media filled with images of work-teams, friends and families posting under the #christmasjumperday tag. Many more charities and organisations are also jumping on the idea to raise funds for good causes.
The rumours game
It possibly won’t come as a surprise to hear that, like most of these campaigns, the core message and call to action has been adulterated as the years have gone by with many people donning the festive sweaters each year for ‘Christmas Jumper day’ without donating to Save the Children as part of being involved. Remember the ice bucket challenge? Developed to promote awareness and raise money for ALS in the US and MND in the UK. Everyone got swept up with dumping buckets of ice cold water over their heads and uploading their vids to social media channels but forgot to donate to the charities themselves. So making sure the message is not diluted is key with these ideas.
Turning a negative into a positive
This year the clothing company FatFace found themselves in an interesting position when online shoppers pointed out their Fair Isle jumper’s pattern looked a little reminiscent of something. FatFace took the opportunity to address the criticism genuinely and productively but firstly saying they felt “like a bit of a melon” and that “once you notice the row of breasts across the chest, you can’t unsee it”. So they decided to make the jumper a symbol of something positive and will now be donating 10% of sales of this particular jumper to the CoppaFeel breast cancer charity. Read more here. Well done Fatface. Perhaps this small action will just have elevated this pretty fair isle sweater to legendary status.
Our Christmas party night is 13th December, we will have our Christmas jumpers at the ready. In the spirit it was intended we will be donating to Save the Children (as well as CoppaFeel this year).