Christmas Station was first seen last year in my New Lords of Time story, also called Christmas Station. In that story, the new Time Lords on the block were terrorised by robot santas and killer Christmas trees running amok on the station. I introduced the food court, the Christmas tree forest and the Winter Wonderland with the toboggan ride and romantic sleigh rides. This time, the Eleventh Doctor brings Amy and Rory and I explained how Christmas Station has a unique method of posting gifts in time for Christmas – any Christmas, any year – using time holes to ensure prompt delivery. There was an element of irony about that, since even when I wrote this story at the beginning of November the Royal Mail had started losing the plot with its deliveries. By the time it started snowing at the end of November, 2010, they fell apart completely, and I know people whose presents hadn’t been delivered by the second week of January, 2011. On the whole, Christmas Station’s system is somewhat superior.

I had to have a different set of bad guys, of course. So I invented the Yebu-Dibu-di. The name was created by a random sci fi character generator, and it seemed perfect for a Flintstones joke. Their appearance was slightly inspired by the guest bad guys in a Doctor Who Adventures comic strip, but I made them into intergalactic jewel thieves and let Amy and Rory re-christen them Grinches, after the Grinch that Stole Christmas.

Zipping about in the Father Christmas Sleigh Ride, labelling the Grinches and posting them to the Shaddow Proclamation wasn’t planned from the start. The idea came to me as I was writing the story, as a good non-violent end to the green meanies. It is Christmas, after all. We don’t want anything nasty happening.

The arrival of the Judoon goes with the Shaddow Proclamation. Again, the dialogue between them and The Doctor, in which he tries to get them to say ‘ho, ho, ho’ came to me as a way of having one last laugh in this little Christmas romp. The last line, “Merry Christmas in Judoon” is a slightly obscure tribute to the film “Battle of Britain” which was on TV the weekend I was writing this story. At one point in the film, an English group captain with a team of Polish trainee pilots gets utterly exasperated by the language barrier and gives the command ‘Silence… in Polish’ which inexplicably works. Merry Christmas in Judoon probably wouldn’t. I very much doubt if Judoon do Christmas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Grinch_Stole_Christmas!
http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Judoon
http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Shadow_Proclamation