It wasn't so much a sweater as it was a horror.

A festive, crimson horror, with white silhouettes of stantlers and cryogonals dancing along, having their merry way across your chest in a gross repeating pattern.

You thought it was completely ridiculous. It reminded you of the ostentatious little outfits your grandmother would dress you in almost every holiday season. If you sniffed long and hard enough, you thought you could even smell the powder and musk aroma of her perfume on the damn thing. It wasn't that you didn't love your grandmother - that would be unthinkable - you just did not enjoy the handful of Christmases you spent at her house. The hard fruitcake didn't taste too great and her good natured teasing wasn't all that nice.

And yes, the holiday sweaters were definitely a variable.

They were ugly and the bright red went conveniently well with your green hair. You were practically the Christmas poster child flaunting just a bit of a sour face, and you hated it.

Needless to say, you weren't pleased when you opened a package from Solidad to get a nice kick in the face of your early childhood. It wasn't warranted and you would have been well off with just the card!

She knew about your hatred of ugly red sweaters so it was obvious she sent it to you as a gag gift. A rotten idea, you thought. The joke was on her for spending her money since you had no use for it.

Since you had plans to see her later that day, you threw your hands in the air and thought to yourself, oh, why the hell not. You put on the sweater with all intents on wearing it out of spite. Give her a good kick back because what was the use of a gag gift if the person genuinely likes it?

As you could have expected, things didn't go as planned.

Solidad knew that you absolutely hated it the first time she caught you looking down with disdain. Instead, she crooned about how cute you looked and how she didn't even need to put up decorations that year so long as you were around. She really souped up the act, making fun as if she were your pesky older sister or something. (You made a mental note to thank your mom for the lack of older siblings.)

Her visit was a pleasant one aside from her impish comments here and there, that is, until people started taking pictures and you were back to being the Christmas poster child.

You came home to see photos of you sipping at a hot chocolate wearing your oh-so-elegant red sweater all over the internet. Magazines sported two line quips of, "Looks like Hoenn's hottest coordinator Drew is getting festive!" and "How cute is that? (And we're not just talking about the dimples this time!)"

The next thing you knew it was a fashion staple for the winter. One in six girls had some sort of nasty pullover, and the statistic halved to one in three for aspiring coordinators or love-struck fans. When members of the Elite Four in freaking Unova started wearing the ugly holiday sweaters you knew the trend was going to stick around for a while, to your dismay.

"I don't know— I think they're sort of cute," May said, leaning back into a Pokémon Center couch.

You pulled the sweater from your bag and tossed it onto her lap. "Keep it."

—

A/N: The description is essentially the entire story. Sorry about that!

Note that I actually can't imagine any of the Unova E4 wearing a hideous holiday sweater, and in this fic May was originally going to be Dawn. (I swapped them last minute because I am a hopeless, filthy contestshipper, not that it makes much of a difference here anyway.)