What can the cops mean?

Don't get us wrong, this holly-bedecked and seasonally adjusted correspondent is fine with the boys in blue giving us such sensible advice as driving safely and watching out for opportunistic persons who regard this time of year as necessary to perfect their techniques of light-fingeredness.

Yet the concept of a stout copper standing there, rocking gently on his toes and heels like something out of a Gilbert and Sullivan light opera and finger-wagging exuberant partygoers to exercise behavioural restraint may be considered as suggesting (and dare we say this?) the rozzers might be a little out of touch.

Of course, we would be aware that those who spill out on to the streets after an evening on the town may well discuss loudly the merits and abilities of various football teams but where does the line get drawn?

"Now, now, sir, I think you just might be tipping over from garrulous and very friendly to loud and obnoxious," the policeman will no doubt say as he withdraws a well-thumbed notebook from his tunic and licks his pencil.

"Especially with your loudly enunciated view that Collingwood is a moral to win the 2015 AFL grand final offering certain proof of your inebriation."

We get the idea that most folk are consumed with a spirit of goodwill towards all persons.

This generally manifests itself with displays of rosy-cheeked cheeriness even among the normally timid, including much singing of Deck the Halls, Jingle Bells and such like, especially as spontaneously delivered by a Yoof in Launceston's malls one day last week.

Santa Claus himself sets a bad example here with all that yo ho ho-ing and such like.

On such a matter, traditionally this columnist dons his gay apparel before gathering up a tattered copy of the 2014 City Park Carols by Candlelight program and venturing into the streets to report on which kid has been naughty and which one has been nice.

As the reader would no doubt be aware, much of the behaviour leans towards niceness even if there is the occasional nointer.

These little people are generally shepherded around the shops by fractious parents who are at the end of their tether yet still with sufficient energy to yell: "Geez, Chantelle, you'rl git it when you git 'ome" as they spy such anti-social, or anti-Santa, acts as tugging on Father Christmas's beard to test whether it's naturally attached or held on with elastic.

It is now my great Yuletide pleasure to offer the customary and traditional seasonal greeting to the good folks of Ringarooma, the North-East township acknowledged at the recent climate change symposium held in the Peruvian capital of Lima as "the true centre of the globe, as the distance to any city may be measured with equal facility from a telegraph pole in the town's main street".

And Ringarooma is reportedly continuing to do its bit on the environmental front to secure a carbon-neutral future.

This includes the ongoing hire of a cow whisperer to instruct local bovines in undertaking the drawback, what with moo cows being responsible for much of any projected 2C deg rise in world temperatures.

So far, according to a local straw-sucking rural operative, "none of them cows have exploded although some's close to it".

To every Ringarooman, and Ringaroowoman, then, an especially happy and bountiful Christmas.

Oh, all right then, may all readers (quiet and unobnoxious to a man and woman) get a real blast out of the season of goodwill.