At last! Someone finally saw the light, and took prompt action to save Christmas from an otherwise inevitable wholesale descent into the gutter.
I refer to whoever took the brave decision this week to finally ban Santa Claus (for those who’ve never watched TV, that’s American for “Krismiss Fader”) from uttering that grossly offensive triple expletive, “Ho, ho, ho!”

That’s right. It seems that Westaff, an Australian recruitment agency which supplies hundreds of Father Christmases to shopping malls all over the country, has instructed its trainee Santas not to utter “Ho, ho, ho” this year, on the grounds that the traditional festive guffaw is “derogatory to women”, and may even traumatise little children.
So instead of “Ho, ho, ho”, Aussie Santas will now say: “Ha, ha, ha.”

Hear, hear, hear! And as Paul Hogan would no doubt have put it if he wasn’t too busy skinning crocs: about bloody time, too.
Personally, I’ve often wondered how long it would take for the relevant authorities to finally clamp down on all these overweight, bearded red-cheeked alcoholic tramps who suddenly appear on the streets from late November to late December, all ringing their little handheld bells and loudly alluding to passing women by the traditional gangsta rap term for “prostitute”.
I mean honestly. Isn’t it bad enough that the sickening old pervert comes but once a year, and that it just so happens to be down your chimney? Does he also have to insult your wife, mother and daughter while he’s at it, too?
So all things told, I have only one thing to say to whichever Australian it was who single-handedly restored some dignity to an otherwise increasingly vulgar, debauched, foulmouthed and sexist season: Good on ya, mate! And there I was, thinking that the Land Down Under produced nothing of any worth whatsoever apart from VicBit and the occasional half-decent Kylie Minogue video…

But of course it’s not all good news on the Father Christmas front. It seems that Westaff’s noble mission has not exactly been greeted with over-enthusiasm by prospective trainees Santas, many of whom have quit in protest at what they term a “ridiculous”, “idiotic” ban.
More worryingly still, even the country’s sex crime watchdogs appear to have missed the entire point of the exercise. Julie Gale, who runs a campaign against sexualising children called Kids Free 2B Kids, had the astonishing, unmitigated cheek to dismiss the entire initiative out of hand.
“Gimme a break”, she told the Telegraph this week. “We are talking about little kids who do not understand that ‘ho, ho, ho’ has any other connotation and nor should they. Leave Santa alone.”
Can you believe it? “Leave Santa alone”, she said. Leave that gross, obese, foulmouthed old paedophile alone, so that he can carry on filling your children’s stockings with filth, and their ears with obscenities, every single blinking year.
I don’t know. My only explanation for this shocking breach of professional ethics is that Julie Gale - along with all those cynics who display similarly impatient attitudes to that wonderful new science, “political correctness” – evidently predates the generation of kids brought up on MTV, Trouble, Bravo and video games such as Duke Nukem and Grand Theft Auto. For those of my readers who similarly “just don’t get it”, consider for a moment any of a number of possible European slang alternatives to Father Christmas’s trademark laugh, starting with English:
“Merry Christmas! Tart, tart, tart!” (Or any of the many available equivalents: “hooker”, “scrubber”, “slapper’, “trollop”, etc.)
Or how about Italian? “Buon Natale! Troia, troia, troia!” (Or even better “Mignotta, Mignotta, Mignotta!”)
It sounds particular appealing in French, too: “Bon Noel! Saloppe, saloppe, saloppe!”
And in Maltese? “Il-Milied it-Tajjeb! Qahba, qahba, qahba!”
Yes, I can see that going down a treat on Republic Street at peak shopping time this festive season. Can’t you?

But for all my wholehearted support for Westaff’s campaign to protect children from “Santa” (which, in case none of you have ever noticed, is also an anagram of “Satan”) I, too, have a complaint to make. Why stop at Father Christmas? Why not extend the ban to the many, many dozens of examples of everyday uses of language which are just as discriminatory, if not downright fiendish?
For instance: I am the first to admit that the UK government was right to (sort of) ban fox hunting a couple of years ago. Trouble is, it was banned for all the wrong reasons.
Cruelty to animals? What sort of lousy excuse is that? The activity should have been banned because it is sexist, nothing more, nothing less. Not only did the jodhpur-wearing, bugle-blowing fox hunters traditionally cry “Tally Ho!” on the hunt… but as Ali G famously pointed out, they also refer to their canine companions as “bitches”.

And there are loads of other grossly indecent expressions which for some strange reason are widely accepted and even encouraged by the powers that be. Sometimes, they even find their way into children’s literature.
For this reason I propose a total and immediate ban on Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island”, on the grounds that it contains the following, utterly disgusting rhyme:
“Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest - Yo, ho, ho and a bottle of rum!”

Ugh! How sick is that? It’s actually a whole lot worse than Santa’s laugh. Not only is there yet an unmistakable allusion to two Californian skank-whores in there somewhere, but there’s also an explicit reference to alcohol, and more than a hint of homosexual necrophilia. In a book written for children! Whatever will our kids be exposed to next?

Having said all this, I must confess that I, too, have a couple of small reservations regarding the whole brouhaha about “ho, ho, ho”. Mainly, regarding the proposed alternative.
You see, I’m not at all sure that “ha, ha, ha” is any less sexist than “ho, ho, ho” to begin with. Being the sort of person who chortles rather than chuckles, my own version of “ha, ha, ha” actually sounds more like “haw, haw, haw”… which in turn sounds more like… well, you get the idea.
For a while there I was about to suggest “titter, titter” instead; until the rather obvious objection presented itself to my senses. So until anyone comes up with a suitably meaningless alternative, I suggest we stick to either “Tee hee hee” or the classic, inimitable and unpronouncable Mutley snicker that usually gets written thus: “Hq?tchhs*q, hq?tchhs*q, hq?tchhs*q”.
Take your pick…