All I want for Christmas is a jumper. Just to clarify, I don’t want one as a gift, I simply want to purchase one to wear over the festive season.

Surely that sounds simple enough. After all, ‘tis the season to be chilly and therefore all the high street stores are surely brimming with woollies, I hear you say.

And you’re right, they are. But have you seen them?

Now, I do get the appeal of the bad taste Christmas jumper theme that is running rife through our stores. But when I was younger these didn’t come off the peg. They committed every fashion crime going, but were all lovingly handcrafted by relatives knitting for a misfit generation – in every sense of the word. Part of Christmas day tradition was to don Auntie Dot’s unique but charming rainbow sweater for the lunchtime pint up the Dog and Duck and the more hideous the better. Many people have stopped knitting and the retailers are quick to spot the opportunity to cash in on this nostalgia gap.

It is true that knitting has made something of a comeback, but it tends to be more about producing fashion for inanimate objects that turns knitters on these days. It’s hardly surprising – most lampposts will wear anything, media tarts that they are.

But what is far more horrifying than the Christmas sweaters in our stores right now is the trend to adorn most of the knitwear with a huge motif of some supposedly cute animal. The designers must be having a right laugh persuading us that it’s hip to dress in outsized children’s pyjama tops. And they’re all at it from the budget stores to the pricier outlets.

Someone must be buying the damn things, but personally I don’t know one single female over the age of six who wants to walk around with polar bears, rabbits or ruddy kittens prancing across their chest. The majority of the rest of the jumpers on the rails look like something mistakenly put on a hot wash for a couple of hours. They’re baggy, misshapen and ugly. Why pay good money to dress in a Worzel Gummidge cast-off? There is one more jumper genre available. Yep you’ve guessed it – good old seasonal gaudiness is back. True, it is that time of year where you can just about be forgiven for wearing sequins before 6pm, but the designers seem to think we want to dress like Ferrero Rocher wrappers for the entire season. So the remainder of this year’s jumpers all come complete with gold glittery thread interwoven through them. You just know that wearing one would put all your fillings on edge and involve becoming snared by every door handle you encounter. Sadly, I could go on as it’s not just jumpers I’m struggling with. Too old for skater skirts and too young for elasticated slacks, I find it hard to find anything to wear.

So maybe I should just stop moaning and get into the festive spirit by getting into the loudest, largest Rudolph jumper I can possibly find.

I wonder if they do them in black?