EVERY workplace has one.

Your Christmas-loving colleague, the self-styled life and soul of the office.

You can hear them before you can see them, hooting and a-hollering along to Christmas songs on their iPhones, long before December.

They live for the Christmas period. Everything in November appears to be geared up to it.

As they get closer to Christmas they accumulate more paraphernalia, to the point that on Christmas Eve at kicking-out time – where they attempt to lead a conga out of the office – they look like they have stumbled into a pound shop and hit every shelf on the way out.

Long before that time, they were demob-happy, on what is described as the ‘Christmas wind-down’ – where excitement grows and productivity decreases.

If you’re struggling to find one in your office, you need to look for the telltale clues: The singing along to Slade in November.

Bringing in a tacky musical doll that will play ‘Ding Dong Merrily On High’ out of key until its batteries die.

Wearing either a tinsel tie, a Santa hat, reindeer’s ears or going the whole hog and dressing as a Christmas pudding, complete with brandy butter.

Their PC monitor, or workstation, covered in tinsel, fairy lights or other festive bunting.

Baubles hanging from their rear view mirror.

The first to suggest a Secret Santa – and also the first to suggest a ridiculous price limit which means you end up spending more money on someone you didn’t want to buy a present in the first place than on a family member who you quite like, but not that much to spend more than £5 on.

If you recognise any of these character traits in your workmates, well, there’s nothing you can actually do.

Complain about it, and you’ll be labelled a ‘Scrooge’.

I don’t mind being called a Scrooge. He was a curmudgeonly old soul, was Ebenezer, but he stood up for what he believed in. He was nothing but fair to Bob Cratchett, who, frankly, wanted more than he was offering – why didn’t he come in earlier on Christmas Eve in order to nail an early finish, had he not heard of flexi-time?

And, in the end, Scrooge comes around to the whole idea of Christmas. He even buys the Cratchetts a massive turkey, something he didn’t have to do.

You could say that Scrooge is vilified by today’s society. Which, to be honest, is a bit rich where we live in a society that criminalises those who seek help from the state which, in today’s climate, would be exactly what the Cratchetts would have to do in order to survive.

Scrooge was a visionary in that sense, standing up for a family that had been left to rot by the state.

So if anyone calls me a Scrooge this Christmas, I’ll thank them for it.

SPEAKING of Scrooge, I must admit I scoffed a bit when the email went around the office this week inviting us to wear our Christmas jumpers to work in return for a donation to charity.

As much as I may come across as a stick-in-the-mud, I’m actually a fan of Christmas. It is the most wonderful time of the year.

You may be surprised to see that, despite my views on tinsel-tie-toting wacky funsters in the workplace, I do own two Christmas jumpers.

They were bought, I should add, before it became de rigeur to gad about town wearing all different manners of festive knitted garb.

But, tis the season and all that, so they get an airing in December.

But to be told we ‘can’ wear our jumpers to work to raise money for charity sticks in the craw a bit.

It all feels a bit prescriptive. ‘You must wear these clothes and then donate to charity.’ But what if we wanted to wear our festive jumpers and not donate? That would be frowned on. So it is implied that we shouldn’t be wearing Christmas jumpers unless we pay charities to do so.

Who’s the Scrooges now?!