This year the shops are fine for onesies, thank you very much. You can still see them hanging full length from displays in large department stores. Many of them look a little forlorn. Antlers flop wearily from furry hoods and the thin, cheap material looks worn before it has ever even been worn. They hang like curtains, pulled over Christmas 2012 as though it were just a memory in the minds of the bustling shoppers.
How has this happened? Well, those bustling shoppers, smiling sweetly at these coloured drapes have grown somewhat fickle and are looking for something else this year. They're looking for Christmas Jumpers.
How do you define a Christmas Jumper? Like last year's onesie, the Christmas Jumper derives its popularity from its irony. Under normal fashion rules, just like the all-in-one pyjama, it is not the kind of thing that is cool at all. Alright, it's designed to be warm, but I mean it is ludicrously uncool.
I know because my Dad has one: I mean an old one. He has a Christmas Jumper that's older than my sister (she's 28) and he wears it... all year round. Oh it's not festooned with knitted penguins or reindeer baubles; there are no snowflakes or happy xmases on my Dad's Christmas Jumper. No sir, wearing that to the gardening would be a little odd. This one's just terrible patterns and awful knitted stripes airlifted straight from the 1980s.
No Christmassy accoutrements? What makes it a Christmas Jumper then? Good question. If you saw it, you'd agree that it is beyond doubt a 'Christmas Jumper', but you might struggle to put your finger on exactly why. And then, like me, when you realise the defining quality, it would probably make you feel a little uncomfortable.
For the answer is that it's authentic and it's awful. My Dad's Christmas Jumper comes from a time when your Grandma knitted everything she could think of with arthritic fingers and fading eyesight. The result was a homemade mesh of knitted eyesores gathered round the Christmas Dinner Table with Grandma beaming at one end, and everyone else looking sheepish.
It is these embarrassing jumpers that the machine-made, mass-produced, deliberately appalling Christmas Jumpers of 2013 are emulating. The manufacturers know what they're up to. It's Christmas. Irony sells. After all, the onesie craze proves that people will wear anything so long as everyone else is wearing it. It almost doesn't matter how ridiculous a thing it is. Somehow, irony became cool. Cool, whatever it means, has always been both marketable and lucrative.
This then is the reason why you won't find any Christmas Jumpers in the shops. They've sold out and everyone is wearing them as though it's some grand experiment in national irony. In this digital age, where a picture of you can be seen by all the people you know, faster than the time it takes for a polaroid photograph to develop, these gaudy sweaters are all the rage.
I don't have a Christmas Jumper. I don't have much desire to wear a onesie. That's alright though isn't it? I mean, I don't want to come across as some sort of Scrooge: Doesn't like Christmas lights, won't wear a onesie, hasn't got a Christmas Jumper. I really do love Christmas. I just want it to be about so much more than these peripheral trends and fashions. What will it be next year? Indoor bobble hats? Cardigans? Apres-ski-wear?
If I were to have a Christmas Jumper I'd want it to have come from the heart of Christmas itself, the love that's supposed to permeate this season of good will: I'd want my Grandma to knit one for me. Unfortunately though, I don't have one of those either.
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