Words by Claudia Schmidt November 17, 2022

Your ticket to being the most legendary attendee at your ugly sweater Christmas party.

For the last five years, Microsoft has been releasing ugly Christmas sweaters and the star of this year’s edition is kinda a big deal.

If you happened to be using a computer between the years of 1996 and 2006, you might remember Clippit (or as we liked to affectionately call it, Clippy), the friendly office assistant that took the form of an anthropomorphic paperclip, who helped noob humans navigate their computers in the early days of home computing.

Yes, it's really real. The Clippy #WindowsUglySweater is here.

Get yours now and help support @College_Success as they assist underserved, low-income students achieve their dream of a college education. https://t.co/cC4kRfCDOM pic.twitter.com/MuSH37cSfH

— Windows (@Windows) November 15, 2022

Clippy was eventually ditched because it became so hated – as an early AI, it wasn’t adaptive to user experience and would offer the same increasingly unhelpful tips over and over – but during the time in-between, Clippy has earned nostalgic cult icon status. In 2021, Microsoft even tweeted that for 20,000 likes they’d bring Clippy back to the modern version of Office.

If this gets 20k likes, we’ll replace the paperclip emoji in Microsoft 365 with Clippy. pic.twitter.com/6T8ziboguC

— Microsoft (@Microsoft) July 14, 2021

Now Microsoft is continuing the Clippy revival with a Christmas sweater that features the friendly little paperclip in all its glory, which you can purchase for $75 USD. Embracing the Christmas spirit, Microsoft is contributing $100,000 USD of its profits to the College Success Foundation, which assists low-income students to access college.

At the time of writing, the sweater has sold out, but if you head to the Xbox merchandise store, you can sign up to be notified when it’s back in stock, so you can be the star of all your ugly Christmas sweater parties.

Long live Clippy.