Locker Room / Tom Humphries: Tis the last column before Christmas. Hate the last column before Christmas. Hate it. So do you. It's the ghost-town shift except all the ghosts have fecked off to be with their families until after New Year.

Nothing happens in the week before Christmas. And at the best of times nothing much happens in this column anyway. If you put the back page up to your ear on any given Monday you can hear the tumbleweed blowing through the desolation that is this column.

It's miserable, I tell you. The best books of the year have been done. The best moments have been flogged to within an inch of their life. The quotes of the year are threadbare from retelling. There is an embargo on "taking a look at the sporting year ahead". Nobody has the stomach for the old awards column. You know the sort of thing.

The Ivor Callely Award for Most Dignified Exit goes to Roy Keane. The Paul McGinley Award for Having Badgers instead of Eyebrows goes to Ivor Callely.

There's the random-seasonal-observations stuff as well, which we got a few years out of. You know the kind of thing. Is it just me or has Eddie Murphy in Shrek destroyed Nativity scenes forever? Is it true that up till recently in all Nativity scenes in Meath the wise men had to be approved by Fintan Ginnity and the swaddling had to be collected by him each evening?

For a while last week I was taken with the idea of a Dickensian farce with everyone gathered in the big house for a Christmas dinner, and old Mr Brady home from Highbury getting irascible with Eamon Dunphy on the subject of Roy Keane, and Bernard O'Byrne retaining a lawyer so he could stay for pudding, and little John Delaney out in the garden playing with his new quiff and asking passers-by if they'd have the time to manage Ireland.

And they'd gather around the telly at three o'clock to hear Seán Kelly's Christmas address to "all the lurvely ladees out there". And Brian O'Driscoll's shoulder would keep him, poignantly, out of the Christmas Cracker-pulling fun. And on and on and on it would go.

Anyway. Every year I mean to steal and store a few jokes, which I would then string together into an elegant necklace of humour in about 20 minutes flat. I'd be gone out the gap while the Sports Editor was still gasping in admiration.

"Gosh, zinger after zinger this week. Just how do you manage it? All that cutting and pasting." Next year folks. Next year.

In the meantime, here's an anecdote I heard this past week about a man out one Christmas Eve golfing in the wilds of Kerry. It's getting dusky and the wind is playing tricks with his game. By the 17th he's knackered and he shanks his ball way off to the left and into a knot of trees.

He considers giving up but finally he yomps after it and finds his Titleist lying beside a homunculus with bright red hair and freckles and a bad gash in his forehead. He gives the fella a prod with his four iron.

"Hey, that you, Gooch?"

"Jaysus," says the small guy, opening his eyes, "You hit that a fair lick. Caught me right smack in the middle of the head. Never saw it coming."

"Yerra, sorry about that," says the golfer "Couldn't see you. Take it easy there for a minute. Thought in the bad light there you were somebody else. Are you okay?"

"Well, yes and no," says the fella, and when he stands up the golfer can see his victim is only knee high to a jockey. "I'll live. What a bloody night. Finish up in the job and it's 'reindeer games' again. Fall for the chocolate-raisins gag every damn year. Thing is I'm actually a Christmas elf and even though this is my busy time of the year the rule is that if somebody catches me out and about I have to grant them three wishes. You're after catching me fair and square so go ahead - make your day."

"Well now, to be fair," says the golfer, "I hit you a fair sceilp on the head just now and you've been decent about it so why don't we just call it quits. I'll say nothing and you say nothing. Nobody say anything. Like a press night for the Kerry footballers."

"No can do," says the leprechaun. "The rules is the rules."

"Look," says the golfer, "when I saw you lying there my first thought was maybe you'd be suing me for negligence and it would be in the papers about me being out golfing on Christmas Eve. But it's all worked out well. I've avoided the litigation. You're okay. I'd be embarrassed to take the wishes. Anyway there's not much I want for. You wouldn't be a cousin of Peter Canavan's, would you? You have the set of him."

And with a shudder the golfer strides off to play the last hole before it gets too dark to see. The elf watches him go and thinks to himself that if he doesn't grant the three wishes this time it might be the thin end of the wedge, so to speak. Failure could lead to a breakdown in the fabric of elfish society. He could become such a threat to the security of the little people that Michael McDowell would be denouncing him from every toadstool. He might be replaced by a low-cost elf from Eastern Europe. So he decides to grant three wishes unilaterally.

"What would a guy like that want? A Kerry All-Ireland? Well, not till Mickey Harte has used up the last of his three wishes. What else? Ta da! I know. Golf!"

So the elf decides that first off he'll grant the equivalent of Tiger's A game every time the golfer hits the course.

"He'll be a legend. What else? Number two, I'll give him Tiger's income. Unlimited moolah. Get some bling bling going. Third? Well, don't know much about Tiger's sex life but I'm guessing it can't be bad." So he grants the entire Tiger Woods gift set: Tiger's game, Tiger's cash, Tiger's pulling power.

Nicely themed wish list, thinks the elf proudly as he skips off to his little house where his wife is conducting seasonal experiments with human growth hormones.

A couple of years pass and it so happens that on another Christmas Eve the selfsame elf is skittering home from a long day's work. He's in the long grass just behind the 17th green, again at dusk, when an enormous drive clips him on the back of the head and almost kills him. When he comes to, there's his old pal standing over him, in a bespoke set of golf duds and smiling broadly.

"Well," says the golfer, beaming down at the elf, "small world!"

"Indeed," says the elf a little tartly. "How have you been? Some drive you hit there."

"Well," says the golfer, "now you mention it, for the couple of years I've been tearing up the courses. Something just clicked with my game and these days I'm playing off scratch. I wind up with more hampers than the St Vincent de Paul."

And the leprechaun smiles and nods.

"Glad to hear it, glad to hear it. And everything okay in the finance department?"

"You won't believe this," says the golfer "but every time I go to the banklink the money just floods out. You know what? I think Bono really did make poverty history."

"Bono," chuckles the leprechaun, shaking his head. "Away with the fairies."

An awkward silence follows.

"And if you don't mind me asking," says the leprechaun, "erm, how are things going, upstairs?"

"I'm sorry?" says the golfer.

"You know," says the elf, "great golf game, tons of income. You must be making out like Colin Farrell in the, ahem, in the luurve department."

"On video you mean, is it?"

"No. I just mean early and often. Like a rat in heat. Have you been kept busy? Rushed off your feet with the ladies?"

"Well," says the golfer, "I don't like to talk about that stuff. A gentleman doesn't tell. Seeing as how you ask however I'm happy to say I've enjoyed a run of four partnerships, over the past 18 months or so. I can hardly believe it of myself."

The elf is a little deflated.

"Neither can I believe it. Just four? In 18 months? Four? I'm an elf and I can beat that with a weekend pass to Copperface Jacks."

"Well, say what you like," says the golfer, "Four women in 18 months ain't bad going for a curate in a small rural parish."

Hate the last column before Christmas. Hate it. Back to work now on next year's Dickensian farce.