SANTA CLAUS has just been caught belting a sassy brat, they're serving up pre-Yuletide cheer in the form of brandy to the monkeys and some doting parent doubtless will cough up the $25,552 asking price for a toy car for the resident juvenile delinquent.

Yes, indeedy, it's the Christmas season yet again, ho-ho-ho and all that, time to lose our collective senses in endless bottles of booze and the NFL scrimmages that pass for shopping at this time of year. Pardon me if I express a mild, but heartfelt, "bah, humbug."

Even - or maybe particularly - in this year of collapsing trade towers and Osama bin Laden, it is tempting to dream of a Dickensian Christmas spent around a roaring log fire, and dinners of roast goose carved by a reformed Scrooge lookalike, while carolers with candles serenade in the gently falling snow.

I live in England, and have for much of the last 32 years, and I've never lived this Christmas dream. Reality is a nightmare of gluttony, overindulgence and commercialism across the land, and London in particular, and I am delighted to be out of it.

It was just about this time a year ago that my wife Elizabeth and I packed up various sticks of furniture, several cats, some pots and pans and ourselves and fled London in favor of cottage life in a sleepy little village about 66 miles from London's Oxford Street shops. That's about 66 miles too close.

Our biggest Christmas concern at the moment is whether to buy a real tree or - just this once - an artificial one, the question arising because of the attention that any tree will receive from Angel Gabriel, our nine-month-old tabby cat packing about 20 kilotons of destructive power in his claws.

(Angel so far has attacked the electrical cord to the outdoor lighting, reduced most of Elizabeth's supply of ribbons to shreds and begun eyeing the presents themselves. It does not take a degree in rocket science to calculate what he can, and doubtless will, do to a Christmas tree.)

Anyway, this is the sort of problem that can make Christmas a delight, along with deciding whether it will be a one-bottle of brandy eggnog or two, what to do about the holly wreath that looks like it has developed leprosy, and whether I can get away with putting the angel atop the tree by stuffing a branch up its butt.

Otherwise, our Christmas Day will be spent opening gifts to the music of King's College Cambridge carolers in the morning, turkey lunch (booked last summer) at the Red Lion in Adderbury and going caroling down at Tesco's supermarket with the Brackley Male Voice Choir, with whom I sing second tenor.

And far behind us, in both time and distance, lay the madding crowds of London, where Charles Dickens, old Scrooge and Tiny Tim must be spinning in their coffins, and where cash replaces sense at this time of year.

Over at Harrods, a department store run by an Egyptian shopkeeper named Mohammed Fayad, some super-rich kid has probably already clamped eyeballs on - and probably will get - a set of flashy wheels known as a "Mini Army Hummer," a cut-down version of the real thing which can go on and off road and up to 40 mph.

If dad and mum, fresh home from a busy day speculating in derivatives on the stock exchange and having already banked this year's million-buck bonuses, want to get the kid back to nature, there's a genuine tree house, about 10 feet tall and carved out of Scandinavian wood, a steal at $18,452.

And the little sweetumses don't even have to climb the thing. The tree house comes with spiral staircase and a fenced-in balcony. (Well, for 18 grand-plus, what would you expect?)

If outdoors is a bit too tough on the little heathens, there's always a Monopoly set - in this case one made of calf leather, with the streets embossed in silver, only $4,260 (in the real stuff). A bargain at the price.

The first Christmas kid had to settle for gold (and probably not a lot of it - times were tough, what with King Herod murdering the first born, not to mention all the taxation) and a couple of supplies of incense resin called myrrh and frankincense. Worth probably 1/200th as much as a Mini Army Hummer.

If he had held out for another 2,000 years or so, he could have had one of Harrods's five-foot teddy bears ($1,844), or a genuine sterling silver and blue lacquer globe of the rest of the world outside Bethlehem ($93,720).

Meanwhile, the Christmas spirit, 21st century style, waxes. In Pfungstadt, Germany, a store Santa Claus whacked a nine-year-old hoodlum who kept trying to peek under his red and white outfit. Santa is suspended from handing out presents.

In New Delhi, apes at the zoo who don't act like nine-year-old brats are getting their just rewards, in the form of daily doses of brandy to keep them warm and happy over the Yuletide season (it apparently gets quite nippy in northern India).

That's not to say the rest of us bipeds aren't also swigging down glasses of Christmas brandy. And scotch and bourbon and gin and scotch and beer and wine and any other form of kickapoo joy juice that will get us blitzed and through the agonies of the season of good will.

In Britain, they estimate that the bill for overindulgence this year will run to a few shekels over $220 million, including cleaning up after every amateur drinker who decides he - and more often these days, she - can outdrink us veteran knee-walking boozers.

Actually, I quit serious drinking eight years ago. But I am allowed a small glass of sherry of an evening, and this year I am contemplating taking on board about a month's supply in advance on Dec. 24.

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, deck us all with Boston Charlie, and all that.

Thought for the Week: I wish the buck stopped here. I could use a few.

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