When it comes to Christmastime joyrides, this may be second only to stealing Santa’s sleigh.

A brazen bandit swiped an empty MTA bus in the Bronx last weekend — and took it all the way to Queens on an hours-long adventure before leaving it just blocks from where it was originally swiped.

No one was aboard bus No. 1010 when it was taken a little before 8 p.m. Sunday, as it was being used as a shelter for off-duty bus operators at Bruckner Boulevard and Hunts Point Avenue in Longwood, police said.

It wasn’t clear when MTA officials discovered the bus was missing, but they didn’t locate it until 4 a.m., when they checked its location on GPS, according to law enforcement sources.

They found that the vehicle had been taken all the way to Queens and then parked back in the Bronx at Westchester and Prospect avenues — roughly half a mile from where it was stolen, cops said.

“I heard about this and I thought that was a joke,” a bus driver hanging out at the intersection where the bus went missing told The Post. “You’ve got to have some balls to steal a big-ass bus and drive it all the way the f–k to Queens.

“The problem is, you have a lot of people who have a fantasy about driving a city bus, and when you leave a bus out there in the open with no one inside, you’re at risk of someone stealing it.”

The thief’s job was made all the easier because city buses don’t require keys to start, according to the driver.

“They’re push-start buses,” he said. “You don’t even need a keyless fob. Anyone can just climb into a bus and push the button and drive wherever the hell they want. It’s a big problem.”

Sunday’s bus-napping is an echo of the infamous antics of transit bandit Darius McCollum — the 53-year-old man with Asperger’s syndrome who has been arrested at least 30 times since he was 15 for illegally driving Big Apple trains and buses.

He copped a plea deal in 2016 — a year after he was arrested for snagging a Greyhound bus from the Port Authority Bus Terminal and taking its passengers to their destination in Pennsylvania.

A judge deemed his love of transit a “dangerous mental disorder” and indefinitely committed him to a psych ward.

The NYPD is investigating Sunday’s incident.

The MTA declined to comment and instead referred questions to the police.

Additional reporting by Max Jaeger