Pubs Are Banning Christmas Sweaters Because They Kill the Vibe

A small town in the United Kingdom has a Scrooge on their hands. A pub owner in Kingston upon Hull is banning festive sweaters.

Alan Murphy, who owns three pubs in the town, isn’t allowing “fancy dress,” including “Christmas jumpers” at his pubs Lion and Key, Hawkes, and Walters. A sign outside one of his bars indicates that before 8 p.m. this kind of attire is allowed, but you’ll have to host your nighttime ugly Christmas sweater party elsewhere.

His reasoning has to do with the type of people who wear Christmas sweaters — a lot of the time it’s large groups of rowdy revelers. Think the rambunctious Santacon crowd.

“We are a small pub and we cannot accommodate large groups,” Murphy told the Hull Daily Mail. “We have spent a fortune making this place nice and we feel we need this dress code, much in the same way some upmarket restaurants won’t allow sportswear,” he explained.

He doesn’t want to attract bachelor parties or large office parties in a place that “only has room for 70 people.”

“We don’t want 15 lads all dressed in Christmas jumpers making a beeline for the bar and making life difficult for others…There are much larger pubs which can hold 400 to 500 who are happy to allow large groups in.”

Murphy’s new rule has definitely upset some Christmas loving customers, but he’s also received a lot of support for the policy.

“At the end of the day lots of our regulars say it’s fantastic what we are doing,” Murphy said. Those people clearly aren’t on Facebook. One person commented on BBC’s Facebook post about the news saying, “since when are pubs doing so well they can afford to turn away people who are perfectly okay but choose to wear a christmas jumper?” Another exclaimed, “What a load of nonsense! I can understand bans on football colours but I have never seen a couple of blokes in a pub having a ‘fair go’ because one had an Elf jumper and the other a Reindeer!!”

A few followers compared Murphy to Scrooge. “And the landlord’s will be expecting three ghosts at some point I’m assuming….let’s hope like Scrooge they lighten up and get with the festive celebrations,” said one. “Bar humbug that’s all they are, oh well the public can always boycott them and go in pubs that don’t mind people having the xmas spirit by wearing xmas dresses n jumpers,” wrote another. One user has seen the rule in action: “Lion and Key refused to let us in on Saturday night because one of our group had a Christmas jumper on, crazy way to run a business.”

Murphy clearly doesn’t care about these people; he’s doing it for his regulars. “These are the people that drink with us all year-round and we don’t want large gangs who come here once a year ruining that for others,” he said.

If you’re looking for a place to show off your new holiday sweater in Kingston upon Hull, you might be out of luck, actually. Murphy says other small pubs have taken notice of what he is doing. “There are other small pubs in the area who also now want to bring in similar rules,” he said.

And if he bothers those people? He doesn’t care; those aren’t the clients he’s looking for, anyway. “During the festive period, we want to be a haven of tranquility for those looking to have a civilized drink in the evening…We are basically telling these groups that it isn’t worth their while coming into a candlelit pub full of couples and older people.”

Murphy could be onto something here…maybe this will encourage people to ditch the itchy, hot, and tacky sweaters altogether and opt for more stylish holiday apparel. Now that would be a Christmas miracle.

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