You better not shout, you better not cry — just hand over the cash.

A gunman dressed as Santa Claus walked into a Tennessee bank demanding cash so he could “pay his elves.”

The felonious Father Christmas strolled into a busy branch of the Sun Trust Bank outside Nashville Tuesday morning, carrying an empty sack and wearing sunglasses.

When the teller asked the scheming Saint Nick to remove his shades, the crooked Kris Kringle whipped out a gun and demanded a free gift of money.

The mood quickly turned less merry when the sinister Santa warned that if the teller put a dye pack in with the cash, he’d come back and “kill everyone.”

That’s when he told the cashier that “Santa needed to pay his elves,” according to WKRN-TV.

“It was a little unbelievable. He was actually jovial, which is scary. He explained that he was robbing the bank because Santa had to pay his elves,” said witness Richlyn Jones.

The bad Santa walked out with an undisclosed amount of cash.

Cops said most bank robbers don a Halloween mask or even just sunglasses, but not usually such a cheerful costume.

“I don’t remember a Santa doing that,” police spokeswoman Kristin Mumford told The Tennessean newspaper. “I don’t recall when a costume like he had today was used for a robbery.”

A jolly old St. Nick usually strikes a few banks around the country each year.

The most infamous Santa strike occurred 82 years ago in Cisco, Texas, when a man dressed as Santa and a band of others shot and killed six — including two cops — and wounded several others in a bank heist.

In that 1927 case, the cohorts were captured — and the Santa, who at first escaped, was lynched by a vigilante mob.

The Tennessee thief was described as a 6-foot-tall, older white male wearing a red velvet suit, white beard and black boots. He did not flee on a sleigh pulled by reindeer, but rather in a gray, mid-size car.

Calls to the North Pole were not returned.

lukas.alpert@nypost.com

