Against the Novelty Pair
The problem with novelty underwear is not that it is embarrassing. It is that the joke gets printed on the cheapest blank in the factory.
In Defence of Christmas Pants
Novelty Christmas underwear is one of the last things a man owns purely for pleasure, and it is usually badly made. How to enjoy the joke and buy well.
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Somewhere around eleven on Christmas morning, in a house that smells of goose fat, a man in his forties opens a soft parcel from his sister and finds a pair of pants with a reindeer on them. He holds them up. Somebody laughs. He says something about needing them, folds them, puts them on the arm of the chair, and by the following Tuesday he is wearing them under his work trousers with no ceremony whatsoever.
I have thought about this ritual more than is reasonable and I have come round to it entirely.
Not because the pants are good. In almost every case they are terrible, and I will be very specific about why. But the transaction around them is one of the few uncomplicated pleasures left in a man's wardrobe, and a magazine that spends its year arguing about gusset construction should be able to notice that.
Audit the wardrobe and see what is left
Go through everything you own and ask what each item was bought to solve.
The coat was bought because it rains. The boots were bought because the last pair went. The suit exists because of weddings and funerals and one particular sort of Tuesday. The work trousers, the gym kit, the running socks, the shirt you were told to get for the job: all of them are answers to a question somebody else asked.
Keep going and the list of things bought for no reason except that you fancied them gets short very quickly. For a lot of men it is a record, a book and a pair of pants with a snowman on.
That last one is doing more work than it looks. It is the only garment in the house whose entire justification is that it was funny in a shop. No problem it solves, no weather it answers, no room it was bought to fit into. It exists because somebody thought it would be nice to make somebody laugh, and then that somebody wore it.
That is not profound. But it is rare, and rare things are worth defending even when they have a robin printed on them.
The gift problem it actually solves
Men are famously hard to buy for, and the reason is that the failure modes are all expensive.
There is the gadget, which arrives with enthusiasm and is in a drawer by February. There is the shirt in the wrong size, which sits in its packaging until the receipt expires. There is the good bottle he will not open because it feels too nice for a Wednesday, which becomes furniture. Every one of these fails by not being used.
The novelty pair does not fail that way. It converts almost perfectly into use.
It has no taste risk, because taste is explicitly not the point and everybody in the room knows it. It has no obligation attached, because nobody will ask about it in March. And it lands in the one category of clothing where a man always has room for another, since underwear is the only thing he owns that he genuinely gets through.
Consider how much effort goes into finding a present that is used rather than stored, and then consider that this one manages it while also being cheap and getting a laugh.
The Christmas jumper made this respectable, and the pants did not need to
There is an older cousin to all this, and its career is instructive.
The novelty knit spent decades as a private embarrassment, the thing an aunt made and a nephew endured, and then turned, somewhere in the 2000s, into a fixture. Save the Children launched Christmas Jumper Day in 2012, and a garment that had been a running joke about bad taste became a national fundraising institution with a date in the calendar.
That is a proper cultural arc, and the jumper earned it. But notice what happened in the process: the jumper became a performance. It is worn to be seen, photographed, counted, and increasingly bought new each year for exactly one Friday in December.
The pants never made that journey, which is precisely what makes them more interesting. Nobody is looking. There is no Christmas Pants Day, no office collection, no photograph on the noticeboard. A man wearing a pair with a pudding on them under a grey work suit on the twenty-seventh of December is doing a bit for an audience of one, and he is the audience.
There is something quietly good about that. Not noble, not deep, just good in the way whistling is good. A man who will keep a joke going in private, with nobody to appreciate it, is generally pleasant to be around in other contexts too.
Note what I am not saying, because this is where these pieces usually go wrong. The point is not that he can laugh at himself. He is not the joke. He is the one telling it, which is an entirely different position to be standing in.
Now the awkward part, which is the manufacturing
Everything above is true. So is this: the standard novelty pair is a badly made garment, for structural rather than accidental reasons.
A novelty pair is chosen off a hook, in a hurry, on the strength of a print visible from two metres away. Nothing else about it is inspected by anyone before purchase. So the money goes into the print and the packaging, and everything a customer cannot see from two metres away gets cut.
Turn one inside out and you will find the same list every time Anatomy of a Brief: Every Panel, Seam and Stitch Explained.
Three panels and no gusset. Front, back, side seams meeting at a point, which is exactly the pressure point a separate gusset exists to remove. Adding one costs a piece and an operation, and nothing about the sales pitch requires it.
Thin single jersey with minimal elastane. Light fabric prints well and costs little, and it means all the recovery is asked of a small amount of elastane that will be tired within a season.
A narrow exposed waistband with a printed logo. Printed waistband branding cracks. Jacquarded branding, woven into the elastic, does not. Run a thumbnail across it and you will know which you have.
A plastisol or transfer print on a stretch knit. This is the real one. The ink sits on top of the fabric as a film rather than in it, so it does not stretch at the same rate as the knit underneath. Every wear works the ink against the fabric, and every wash accelerates it. Within a season the print has hairline cracks and within two it is flaking. The film also blocks airflow completely across its area, which on a garment worn against skin all day is not a trivial detail.
Folded and stitched leg openings. No binding, so the hem curls, and once a hem curls it ropes across the thigh.
One further thing is about the calendar rather than the pattern. Seasonal stock is made to a date. It has to be on a shelf in November, it will be gone by January, and nobody will write in about it in April. That is a production environment which does not reward care, and it shows.
None of this is a scandal. It is what happens when a garment is sold on its face.
Buy the joke and buy it well, which are not in tension
The honest editorial position is not "do not buy novelty pants". It is that a garment worn on the best day of the year is a strange place to be saving money The Best Cheap Underwear That Is Not a False Economy.
Six rules, and they are all easy.
Buy the joke in a style he actually wears. The most common failure and the least forgivable. A brilliant print on a style a man dislikes is a pair worn once, out of politeness, and never again. If he wears trunks, buy trunks cotton trunk. If you do not know, ask someone who does Briefs, Boxers, Boxer Briefs or Trunks: How to Choose.
Prefer woven to printed knit. The best possible novelty garment is a woven cotton boxer short. Woven cotton is stable, it does not stretch, so a pattern printed on it does not distort and does not crack, and the whole garment ages by softening. This is why the classic printed boxer has survived for a century and the printed jersey trunk has not printed woven cotton boxer short.
Prefer a woven or all-over pattern to a single large placed print. A pattern woven into the cloth, or a small repeating motif printed across it, distributes the design instead of putting a stiff plastic panel in one place madras cotton boxer short. It also looks better, since a large placed print is distorted by the body the moment it goes on Why Men Are Frightened of Colour.
Buy from a maker who makes underwear the rest of the year. The single highest-yield rule. A proper underwear brand's Christmas print sits on their normal pattern block, with their normal gusset, waistband and leg finish cotton rib brief. A novelty company's print sits on whatever was cheapest. Same joke, entirely different object.
Check the waistband with your hands. Stretch about ten centimetres and let go. It should snap back instantly and completely. If it returns slowly, the garment is already partway through its life and it has not left the shop Buy It Once: The Durability Guide to Briefs That Last Years.
Buy his real size. The one genuine sizing risk here is the well-meaning gift that is a size out, which turns a funny present into a slightly uncomfortable one. Underwear is usually excluded from returns on hygiene grounds, so there is no fixing it afterwards.
Follow those and you have spent a little more on something that will still be funny in five years, which is more than the socks manage Colour, Stripes and Character: The Art of the Interesting Sock.
What to do with the ones you already own
You have some. Everybody has some. Here is the sensible way to run them.
Keep them at the back and let them be seasonal. A joke told once a year is a tradition; a joke told every day is a personality, and not one anybody chose. The pudding pair earns its drawer space precisely because it appears in December and then goes away again The Drawer Audit: How Many Briefs You Need and When to Replace Them.
Wash them cold and inside out, and keep them out of the tumble dryer entirely. Heat kills waistband elastic and heat plus tumbling cracks a print. That matters more here than anywhere else, because you will not be able to replace it with the same one How to Wash Underwear Properly.
Retire them when the elastic goes, not when the joke gets old. The joke does not get old. That is the entire mechanism of Christmas. Elastic, on the other hand, has a genuine service life, and a pair that no longer stays up has stopped being funny for reasons that have nothing to do with comedy.
And do not put them into the everyday rotation to use them up. That is how a good joke becomes a bad Tuesday.
The claim
The correct number of novelty pairs for a grown man to own is not zero. I would put it at two or three, kept at the back, brought out in December, and retired on the state of the elastic.
But own the good version. Buy it woven, buy it from someone who makes underwear for a living, buy it in his actual size, and accept that it costs somewhat more than the hook by the till at the petrol station. The reason is not that the garment deserves respect. It is that the joke does. A cheap pair with a cracked reindeer and a wavy waistband is a joke that stopped working after one season, and the whole point of this particular joke is that it comes back every year.
There is a version of the argument this site makes that ends up joyless: buy less, buy better, inspect the seams, count the panels, treat every purchase as an engineering decision. Most of that is right and I stand behind it Against the Multipack. But it is not the whole of dressing, and a wardrobe assembled entirely from correct answers is a slightly sad object.
The man with a drawer of well-chosen cotton and one pair with a snowman on it has the balance exactly right. He is not confused about which is which. He simply worked out, at some point, that pleasure counts as a reason.
The defence has a limit, and the limit is the garment underneath the joke. A tradition is worth keeping; a stiff printed panel on the cheapest available blank is not what anybody meant by one Against the Novelty Pair.
Questions people ask
Are novelty Christmas pants any good?
Usually not, and the reason is predictable. They are bought on the strength of a print, so the print and the packaging get the budget and the construction does not. Expect three panels, no gusset, thin jersey, a narrow waistband with printed rather than woven branding, and a folded leg hem that curls. The exception is a seasonal print from a brand that makes underwear all year round, which will sit on their normal pattern block and be a genuinely good pair with a joke on it.
Why do printed pants crack and peel?
Because most prints on stretch knits are a film of ink sitting on top of the fabric rather than a dye bonded into it. The knit stretches every time you move; the ink does not stretch at the same rate, so it works loose, develops hairline cracks and eventually flakes. Hot washing and tumble drying accelerate it sharply. Prints on woven cotton, like a classic boxer short, do not have this problem, because woven cloth barely stretches at all.
What is the best novelty underwear to give as a gift?
A printed woven cotton boxer short from an established underwear brand, in the recipient's actual size. Woven cotton takes a pattern without distortion and does not crack, the construction on a real underwear brand's seasonal line matches their normal range, and the loose woven boxer is a style almost every man is happy to wear at home. Avoid a large placed print on a stretch knit, and avoid buying an unfamiliar style, since a joke on a garment somebody dislikes gets worn once.
How should I wash novelty printed underwear?
Cold, inside out, on a gentle cycle, and never in a tumble dryer. Turning the garment inside out protects the print from abrasion against the drum and against other clothes. Cold water keeps the ink film from softening and shifting, and keeping it out of the dryer protects both the print and the waistband elastic, which is what actually ends the garment's life. Done properly it keeps a printed pair presentable for considerably longer.