BAH. And, indeed, humbug. When he wrote A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens gave Ebenezer Scrooge a voice he described as "grating", presumably because that's how he imagined a "Bah, humbug" or three would sound most miserly when fired at whatever poor unfortunate was attempting to kindle some festive spirit in literature's best known misanthrop.
I might not be going the way of Scrooge - yet - but I do find myself becoming a little more bah and a tad more humbug each year.
It is no longer Scrooge that grates loudly but Christmas itself - or, to be more precise, the annual clueless binge on credit, cake, consumerism, self-indulgence and profligacy that now masquerades as Christmas.
Never mind grating - it would grind the soul if you let it, this circus of confusion, this counterfeit Christmas.
It's unfashionable to say so, but we have successfully severed the festival from its original meaning - and that's the birth of Jesus, the Christ of Christmas, in case you were wondering.
Take, for example, Santa's 'grotto', which is sometimes called a 'workshop', just to doubly confuse the gullible.
I like Santa Claus as much as the next man - only four more sleeps until he visits... - but there is something about the shopping centre grotto that makes every fibre of my being yell "Bah, humbug".
Just as today we marvel at the ingenuity of the Egyptians who built the pyramids, so future civilisations will be flabbergasted when their archaeologists uncover our grottoes and conclude - as they surely will - that they were constructed as monuments to our stupidity.
Great Pyramid of Giza? Forget it - a fat bloke in a polyester suit with a chip and pin machine is the height of it; Dick Turpin wore a mask; Shopping Centre Santa wears a beard.
For a start, shopping centres are always too hot, too noisy, too bright, too busy to be enjoyable for the sane, never mind babies and young children. The climax of the 1812 Overture is a centre of calm compared to the average shopping centre at Christmas.
Then, as if they haven't suffered enough already, we make children queue 'to see Santa'.
Except it isn't Santa, because everyone knows the real Santa is busy, hard at work with the elves in the North Pole.
So we end up telling children that the Santa they are about to see - in the sense that 'about to see' actually means 'in an hour or so, when you eventually get to the front of the line' - is in fact some sort of 'Santa's helper'. And who wants to see him?
Next, there's the not insignificant detail that babies and small children don't much like being passed to strangers, much less strangers with fake beards. Would you normally thrust your offspring upon someone you have never met?
There's the obligatory unspeakable photograph, of course. It's a given that terror will be etched on the child's face; the only variables are to what degree their body will be tensed in repulsion and how tear-drenched their grotesque Christmas 'outfit' - "but isn't she cute?" - has become.
Indeed, it is a verifiable fact that a presentable photograph has never once resulted from a liaison between a reluctant child, an overbearing parent and a cheesed-off fake Santa in a shopping centre. Ever.
Finally, there's the 'present', which usually doesn't survive past the pick and mix. If, by some miracle, it does make it home, you can be sure that within weeks it will be the subject of a 'safety recall' advert.
Christmas doesn't feature heavily in the works of Shakespeare - Easter was the dominant Christian festival then - but in the opening scene of Hamlet, a bit-part character called Marcellus speaks of "the season wherein our saviour's birth is celebrated".
Today, we tend not to do 'the saviour', much less celebrate his birth. Santa, yes; but Jesus, the saviour whose incarnation is recalled during this season? Not much.
Anyone who queues up for Santa's shopping centre grotto these days will likely be familiar with the children's storybook The Gruffalo.
It tells of how a mouse, in order to avoid being eaten, tricks a fox, snake and owl into believing that he's off to see his friend the Gruffalo, a fantastic creature of his own imagination which happens to have fox, snake and owl as its favourite foods.
The would-be predators are terrified and the mouse, smug in the knowledge that "there's no such thing as a Gruffalo", wanders on through the wood... until he encounters a real-life Gruffalo, exactly like the animal he imagined.
Recently I heard it described that when it comes to God, we are much like the mouse, creating our own myths of what he is like. Or not like, as the case may be - if we believe he exists at all.
Which is all very well, until we meet the real thing - not some sort of cosmic Gruffalo, but the baby in a manger; Immanuel, God with us.
Without that, Christmas - the true Christmas, not the shopping centre Santa version - is as fulfilling as wrapping paper without the present.
May you have a happy, bah humbug-free Christmas.
