As the C-word season gets under way, Richard Littlejohn brings you a bumper edition of Bah, Humbug!
Every year, killjoys and prodnoses do their best to ruin the festive period, proclaiming Christmas offensive to ethnic minorities and banning fairy lights and paper chains on elf'n'safety grounds.
Stories about councils and government departments sending out cards with innocuous, non-specific greetings instead of 'Merry Christmas' and drawings of Islamic minarets rather than mangers and Christmas trees have become so ubiquitous that few newspapers can be bothered to print them any more.
But never underestimate the ingenuity of the jobsworths when it comes to spoiling the festivities.
This week we've had some jumped-up security guard and a Plastic Plod in Llandudno, North Wales, stopping primary school children singing carols in a shopping precinct. They said it was too loud.
Too loud for what? We're hardly talking Led Zeppelin here.
Next year, they'll be insisting that all shoppers wear noise-cancelling headphones and sign a waiver promising not to take legal action if they suffer perforated eardrums as a result of exposure to a group of six-to-11-year-olds singing Away In A Manger.
Then I heard from Mail reader Gerry Moore, who took his five-year-old grand-daughter to Santa's grotto at Debenhams, in Chelmsford, Essex.
Last year the little girl sat on Santa's knee. This year, as she went to climb up she was told that she had to stand. When Mr Moore asked why, Father Christmas said she might fall off and hurt herself.
Elf'n'safety, innit.
Thinking this was just a piece of localised madness, we rang Debenhams, who confirmed that it was now company policy throughout Britain not to allow children to sit on Santa's knee. Curiously, they refused to give a reason.
Either they're afraid of getting sued or they're worried that Chris Langham, somewhat short of offers to appear in panto this season, might have sneaked under the radar and got a job playing Santa in a department store.
Elsewhere, in Halesowen, West Midlands, Father Christmas has been told by insurers that he must wear a seatbelt and can go no more than 5mph.
You couldn't make it up.
But the story which takes the mince pie this week is the news that plans for reindeer to pull Santa's sleigh through Windsor have been scrapped on the orders of officials from the Department of Farming and Rural Affairs.
Windsor has been declared a Blue Tongue Surveillance Zone and movement of all livestock, including reindeer, has been suspended.
The sleigh will now be pulled by a team of huskies.
Altogether now:
Rudolph the blue-tongued reindeer
Had a very nasty cough
So they put him in a face mask
Wouldn't let him take it off
All the men from elf'n'safety
Said he couldn't go to town
If he tried to leave the farmyard
They would have to put him down
Then one foggy Christmas Eve Santa came to say
Rudolph your blue tongue's so bright
Won't you guide my sleigh tonight?
Though Santa had to wear a seatbelt
Rudolph couldn't pull the sled
They drafted in a team of huskies
And shot poor Rudolph in the head.
Ho, ho, ho!
Littlejohn also has an opinion on the teacher, Gillian Gibbons..
Makes you proud to be British (part 593)
The treatment of schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons in Sudan is monstrous. But what did she expect?
It may have been na've of her to name a teddy bear 'Mohammed'.
It doesn't take much to inflame the peace-loving floggers and beheading enthusiasts.
They may not represent mainstream Islam, whatever that is, but their track record is well known.
Mrs Gibbons must have been aware of what she may be letting herself in for.
If there's one thing they hate more than Western infidels, it's Western infidel women.
I sympathise with her predicament, but it was pretty rash to go there in the first place. The Sudan is hardly a perfumed garden of human rights.
Same goes for Saudi Arabia, a stone age kingdom with oil, which has just sentenced a young female victim of gang rape to 400 lashes.
Her 'crime' was to admit being in a car with a man other than her husband or brother.
I wonder what the enlightened, Left-wing multiculturalists who are always urging us to 'reach out' to barbarians make of that one.
We could hardly send a helicopter gunship to rescue Mrs Gibbons. But we have given Sudan £326million in aid over the past five years, with another £114million in the pipeline.
If the Sudanese government continues to claim there's nothing it can do to protect innocent British citizens from bloodthirsty religious fanatics, we should tell them to go to hell and cut off the cash.
We should also tell any UK passport holder stupid enough to want to work in Sudan or any other 7th-century hell-hole that in future they're on their own.
Typically, our craven Foreign Office - scared stiff of offending volatile Muslims at home - responded to this outrageous kidnapping by saying how much it respects Islam.
Makes you proud to be British.