I KNOW smoking is bad and people shouldn’t do it, but I’m one of those who do.

I’ve smoked a pipe for forty-odd years, inspired initially by my adventure heroes Alan Quartermain and Richard Hannay.

I could have added Santa Claus as inspiration as he, too, was a pipesmoker - at least according to Clement C Moore the author of the poem A Visit from St Nicholas.

It starts with the famous line ‘Twas the night before Christmas’ and includes the following: “The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth/And the smoke, it encircled his head like a wreath.”

Nothing wrong with such a warm festive image, you might say. After all, when the modern image of Santa was invented lots of fat men with white beards smoked pipes.

Fast forward to 2012 and attempts are being made to transform Father Christmas into a smoke-free Santa.

Canadian publisher Pamela McColl is the culprit after cutting the pipe reference from an new version of the poem.

“I don’t think Santa should be smoking in the 21st Century,” she said.

But the decision has upset the American Library Association and the USA’s National Coalition Against Censorship. It’s annoyed Tunners, too.

Sanitising Santa by wiping his pipe from the Moore poem is literary vandalism. Where on earth might such political correctness lead?

Should we be banned from telling the tale of the Pied Piper of Hamlyn because the guy was clearly a child abductor? And what about the story of Snow White, which includes an attempted murder, and Hansel and Gretel with its cannibalistic elements?

Animal cruelty, too, crops up in children’s literature - blackbirds baked in pies and wolves axed to death by woodcutters are just two examples.

The NSPCC and the RSPCA aren’t daft enough to call for these nursery stories to be changed - so why mess around with pipesmoking Santa?