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The penguin has no business being a Christmas animal. It lives in the wrong hemisphere entirely, where December is high summer, and it has never met a reindeer. None of this has stopped it becoming one of the most popular motifs in festive knitwear, and we think we know why: it already looks like it is wearing dinner dress.
That is the whole trick. A penguin is black and white and formal before anybody does anything to it, so stick a Santa hat on one and the joke is complete with no further effort. Add a scarf and it is cosy. Add a bow tie and it is going somewhere nice. Put three of them in a row and you have a repeating pattern that works on a jumper better than almost any other animal.
Penguin jumpers are also the safest novelty knit to buy for somebody else, because nobody dislikes penguins. They land equally well on a toddler, a teenager and a grandparent, which is not true of a jumper with a joke on it. Expect a lot of black, white and icy blue in this section, often with a snowflake or two, and some genuinely lovely knitted versions among the printed ones.
