The two photos that launched Jessica Aceti and Brian Kirk to seasonal web-fame. Photo by John Keatley.
“After all these years I’m still trying to figure out how that picture initally got traction,” Seattle’s Jessica Aceti tells me. “I think it might’ve been the goat.”
That goat, a “petrified, taxidermied pygmy goat named Little Wonder” soon found itself rocketed to oddball fame along with Aceti and her husband Brian Kirk, whose 2008 photo featuring their horrifying seasonal attire and awkward posture has become the internet’s top “Ugly Christmas Sweater” meme.
The photo came about when Aceti, who works as the film programmer at Central Cinema and creates causal game apps, asked a photographer friend named John Keatley she’d worked with through Seattle’s weirdo ad agency, Wexley School for Girls, if he would shoot a strange Christmas card idea she had brewing in her head.
“I had this idea of making an odd Christmas card and styling it with that goat,” Aceti says. “I’m a hoarder of weird stuff. At the time, we just made up these characters in our mind that were these awkward ugly people, and we’ve always just loved shitty Christmas sweaters.”
After Keatley posted two of the photos on his blog, the images unexpectedly started taking off.
“One day he called us and was like, ‘yeah, a lot of people are looking at it,'” Kirk says. “Then the next year, more people started calling us. Jessica’s mom was like ‘I saw you on the news!’ Then it was on Reddit. Then it was on The Today Show. Then it was on Ellen. It got to the point where nothing really surprised us. Every year now starting at the end of November we get calls almost every week from people who see us somewhere.”
Some of Kirk’s friends in San Francisco recently pulled over on the side of the road because they spotted a series of signs with their pictures lining the street. They ended up being ads for some random company’s big holiday party. Local diner Skillet ended up using the photo heavily in their holiday party advertisements as well. Kirk and Aceti considered showing up to the party uninvited, dressed in character.
In the span of 6 years, Aceti and Kirk have become America’s default photo for anything and everything “ugly Christmas sweater.” Some people went so far as to photoshop their heads on top of them.
A brief sampling of ugly sweater parties and groups from across the country featuring Aceti and Kirk’s photo.
In 2011 the photo even made its way onto Danish National Television, where the telecasters made fun of the photo without realizing it wasn’t real.
“We’ve seen blogs where people go back and forth trying to figure out if it’s real or fake, cross examining it for weird stuff, like, ‘Look at the pants! It’s real, just look at the pants!’” Kirk says. The internet’s confusion over the images’ veracity has become Aceti and Kirk’s favorite part of the weird web fame. At one point, they were the top Google image search for “Ugly Couple.”
When the image was posted on Ellen DeGeneres’ blog, it garnered thousands of comments, which the couple gleefully pored over. They especially relished the ones deriding how unattractive they were. The post eventually got pulled however—the couple suspects Ellen was worried they might get upset about the comments if the characters Aceti and Kirk portrayed were indeed real.
“It’s funny,” Aceti says, “our niece would get super defensive and pissed off, she’s a teenage girl. People would post this photo and be like ‘HAHA THAT’S MY MOM’ and she’d be like ‘NO IT’S NOT IT’S MY UNCLE AND MY AUNT.’ We’d have to tell her, ‘no, it’s okay.’ The illusion that we’re real people is the best part.”
Aceti and Kirk say the pinnacle of this whole episode has been the one time JWoww from Jersey Shore posted the photo, decalring that she’d “never go to a party with these people.”
“She even called me out,” Kirk says, “she wrote something like, ‘would you ever go out with this guy? Look at him!’ It was pretty amazing.” It’s quite possible that it’s what inspired JWoww to shoot her own ugly Christmas sweater photo.
While the initial two photos are the ones that launched them to their strange famedom, Aceti and Kirk have ended up taking holiday photos in character every year since. “Those more recent ones never took off,” Aceti says. “It was just those two first ones. Even so, every December, it’s been really fun to see where they end up.”
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