Family Christmas pajamas: Shoddy Goods 076
The midcentury "tradition" that embarrassed a million kids
Hey, merry almost-Christmas! Jason Toon here with a stocking-stuffer-sized Shoddy Goods, the newsletter from Meh about consumer culture. This time out, I let the pictures do more of the talking so you can spend more time with the people you care about and less with me - consider that my Christmas gift to you!
Will you and your family wake up in matching pajamas on Christmas morning? It’s a thing these days, a kitschy, silly way to heighten the sense of occasion. Like all uniforms (but more fun), they make the people who wear them feel closer together. It’s also an easy way to fill a gift slot for everyone in the family, not a trivial concern for busy parents.
So, when and where did this all get started? And how “traditional” is it, really?
The ‘50s: “Close Harmony”
Matching pajamas for Christmas morning seems like an old-timey thing, redolent of a day when families were closer, and people got more into the spirit of Christmas. Well, not to get all Grinchy, but they’re a commercial creation with a very specific start date. Family Christmas sleepwear sets started showing up in catalogs and ads in 1957. (There’d been father-son, mother-daughter, and husband-wife pajama sets before, but not for the whole family, nor with a Christmas angle.) At this point, red and white are the only colors, which is not only a Santa Claus-approved colorway but equally suitable for all ages and genders.
My guess is that somebody in the apparel industry realized December 25 is pretty much the one morning everybody sits around in their pajamas with their families, and asked the question he got paid to ask: how can we make money from this? Not that there’s anything wrong with that. These vibrant Yuletide uniforms have an undeniable cheesy, cozy, cutesy charm, whatever the motives behind their creation.
The ‘60s: “Family Pajama Party”
As those kids grew up and wanted to be cool, though, that cheesiness became a liability. Matching PJs started to feel passe, a relic of the Ike age unsuited (sorry) to the tempestuous ‘60s. Sears and Montgomery Ward tried to juice the formula with new stylistic influences, like Western and Nordic. Blue joined the red-and-white mix for the first time.
The tweaks don’t seem to have made much difference. For aspiring young longhairs, the cultural headwinds made dressing up like your parents a non-starter - indeed, the whole concept of pajamas was suspiciously uptight, let alone paying The Man for a special set to only wear around Christmas. By mid-decade, family pajama sets had virtually disappeared from the market, and they’d stay gone for several years. They were just too Ozzie & Harriet for a Woodstock world.
The ‘70s: “Classic Country Look”
A funny thing happened on the way to the future: family Christmas pajamas made a comeback, just when those boomer kids were starting to have kids of their own. This time, there was more of an attempt to differentiate the adults’ sleepwear from the kids’, and male from female. Rather than a uniform, the family PJs of the ‘70s tended toward coordinated variations on a design theme.
As with the era’s home decor, these sets often used “country” elements to evoke an earlier era of coordinated family pajamas that never existed. Historical accuracy aside, young boomer parents could enjoy the nostalgia of their own childhood Christmases while maintaining a distinct look for every me in the Me Generation family.
Of course, today, matching family PJs are a Christmas fixture like never before. After another low point on the fam-jammies cycle in the ‘80s, they came roaring back in the ‘90s by hip brands like Hanna Andersson. In our nothing-ever-dies era, they’re big sellers from Target and Old Navy on down, you can get them in the full spectrum of licensed pop-culture properties, and they starred in a Taylor Swift video. If this family Christmas pajama revival keeps up, I might have to remove the quotes from “tradition”.
Yep, we do the family Christmas pajamas. We also do stockings for the whole family. Heading down the stairs together, and then spending a little time poking through the little gifts, obligatory orange, and random candies while we’re still waking up with the cup of coffee is essential. Or I thought it was, until I found out my wife’s family skips the whole deal and jumps right to the presents. What!?
What holiday traditions do you indulge in, and which do you avoid? Let’s hear about ‘em in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.
—Dave (and the rest of Meh)
’Twas the newsletter before Christmas, and down in the footer, story links were stirring to Shoddy Goods’ most gooder: