NOT for the first time, I'm in trouble. There is a reprimand in my Christmas stocking. I am accused of a pretty heinous crime: deliberately encouraging children to put themselves in harm's way.

Because, last week, I wrote to Santa asking him to send us a White Christmas so that I could take my grandchildren sledging. I did it in all innocence, honest guv. I didn't know that sledging was now on the politically correct hit list

Teacher Tess, Beggars-dale's LoCoPoCoThoPo (Local Commandant, Politically Correct Thought Police) just cannot believe that I had not read a report published just a month ago from a group of Scottish doctors which had studied the dangers of sledging.

It was a common cause of injury, they said, and could even prove fatal. They suggest that it should either be banned or children taking part should be made to wear crash helmets, protective gloves, and use slopes free of trees, posts, or bollards.

This has caused such a flurry in Tess's world of education that her school has now banned sledging, along with conkers, marbles, yo-yos and the sack race at school sports. The kiddiewinks might hurt themselves, you see, and some nasty lawyer might sue the school.

Now this is the festive season. This is the time when we wish friends, relatives and even people we don't like very much Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

For children, in particular, it is a magically happy time. Yet here we have Tess and her po-faced cohorts trying to take away many of the things that makes them, and made us in the long gone days of yore, deliriously happy.

Which, rather neatly for a change, takes me to yet another set of experts who have decided that they must discover the scientific reason for happiness. Even experts from the Royal Society have suddenly decided that spending all their time finding out what causes famine, war, plague and pestilence - i.e. what makes people unhappy - is wrong.

The reason from this volte face comes, of course, from America where a psychologist has just been give £18 million in grants to study the causes of happiness.

So far, he has come up with three types of happiness, which the Rev Rupe, our vicar, could have told him years ago

The first happiness, says this whiz kid, is sensual pleasure, like over-eating or drinking. But that doesn't last, he says, as if he had not noticed that the sales of hangover cures soar at this time of the year.

The second comes from doing what we are good at: i.e. a job we enjoy or playing a sport we excel in. Brilliant thought, that: tell it to some poor so-and-so stuck in a call centre today.

And number three comes from a "meaningful life." This means that you use what skills you have to help others and the world around you.

What a stroke of blinding genius. Bit old, though: it was invented some 2,000 years ago by a chap whose birthday we celebrate this week.

So this guy has got £18 million to discover Christianity. In the meantime, some of his colleagues want to stop our children skinning a knee or enjoying themselves with a bit of calorie rich, full flavour Christmas pud cos it could make them obese in 30 years time.

To quote my old mate Ebeneezer, "Humbug." I hope even more now that it snows, for there is nothing like sledging to give you an appetite for roast turkey and Christmas pud. Happy Christmas to all (and that even includes you, Teacher Tess).

* The Curmudgeon is a satirical column based on a fictitious character in a mythical village.