The Holiday Sweater

The holiday sweater is a red crewneck with white snowflakes around the yoke and one green reindeer on the left chest. For eleven months of the year it stays folded in tissue paper inside a hat box on the top shelf of the hall closet, the box closed with a band around the middle.

My grandmother knitted it one December and gave it to me wrapped in the tissue it still rests in. The yarn is a wool blend with enough acrylic to hold its shape, and the pattern was her own — snowflakes around the yoke, one reindeer on the chest. She worked the reindeer freehand and was never satisfied with the legs, though nobody in the family could see what she meant. She has been gone several years now, and the sweater has gone on as it always did.

Unwrapping it is the same every December. I slide the band off the box, lift the lid, and part the tissue from the middle. The sweater is folded with the reindeer facing up, and the fold across the middle has pressed into the wool so deeply that the crease survives a full day of wearing and shows again the next morning. The tissue has yellowed along the folds where it has creased against the yarn all these years.

The loose thread hangs from the inside of the left cuff, about two inches of the same red yarn. I have known about it for years. I caught it on a door latch one December and watched it lengthen, and I have taken the kitchen scissors out twice since with the intention of cutting it and put them back both times. I pulled at it once, gently, to see what would happen, and a row of stitches shortened before I stopped. Nobody in the house mentions it. It is simply there each year, the way the crease is there.

It appears in every December photograph in the house. My brother props his camera on the mantel, sets the timer, and we arrange ourselves in front of the tree with the dog held still by whoever is standing closest. The sweater is the only constant in those pictures. The children get taller every year; my niece, held in my arms in the earliest one, has since grown past my shoulder. My own hair goes from dark to grey in the frame-by-frame of it. The sweater's red fades so slowly that the difference only shows when the photographs are laid out side by side, and the reindeer has lost the tip of one antler between the first photograph and the third.

After Christmas week I wash the sweater in the bathroom sink, in cold water, and lay it flat on a towel on the floor to dry. Then I fold it reindeer-up, wrap it in the same tissue, and put the box back on the top shelf, where it stays until the next December.

The box came down this December as it has every December, and the sweater is out of it again. The loose thread hangs from the inside of the left cuff, two inches of red yarn that catches the light whenever the cuff moves.