NEW YORK —Santa has kicked the habit in time for Christmas. No, not the sugar plum habit, or his fur-wearing habit, or his penchant for romping recklessly around open flame.

No, gentlepeople, this is the year the man in red gave up pipe tobacco, at least in a new book version of ” ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” that has received attention from some lofty corners, including the American Library Association.

The self-published Pamela McColl of Vancouver, Canada, has a mission for her story, to protect children and their parents from the ravages of smoking. She mortgaged her house and sunk $200,000 into her telling of the 189-year-old holiday poem, touring the states to promote it ahead of its September release.

What, particularly, did the 54-year-old entrepreneur and mother of adult twins do? She excised these lines: “The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth. And the smoke, it encircled his head like a wreath.” And she added to the cover: “Edited by Santa Claus for the benefit of children of the 21st century.”

And she included a letter from Santa on the back jacket flap announcing that “all of that old tired business of smoking” is behind him, claiming (by the way) that the reindeer can confirm his fur outerwear is faux out of respect for animals, including the polar bears of his beloved North Pole.

Deborah Caldwell-Stone, the ALA’s deputy director for intellectual freedom, doesn’t have a hard heart. But she doesn’t see tobacco addiction when she considers what McColl has done.

“This wasn’t a retelling. This wasn’t a parody. This wasn’t an adaptation. This wasn’t a modernization. This wasn’t fanfic. This was presenting the original but censoring the content. That kind of expurgation that seeks to prevent others from knowing the original work because of a disapproval of the ideas, the content, is a kind of censorship that we’ve always disapproved of.”

Comedian Stephen Colbert had some thoughts on the matter, only he was louder and funnier.

“Santa can’t quit smoking,” he bellowed on his Comedy Central show, holding back a laugh. “He needs that vice. You try dealing with the stress of delivering the world’s toys in a single night.”