We’ve sourced some of the most interesting and thought-provoking Christmas Quotes from Clarence Clemons, Emma Chamberlain, Norman Vincent Peale, Prince Royce, Edwin Louis Cole. Each of the following quotes is overflowing with creativity, and knowledge.
I wanted an electric train for Christmas but I got the saxophone instead.
During the middle of sophomore year, my friends and I would get bored at lunch, so we would film videos on my computer webcam of us dancing in the gym to Christmas music.
Christmas waves a magic wand over this world, and behold, everything is softer and more beautiful.
I remember when I was working at Sprint, I’d work on my birthday, New Year’s Day, and even Christmas Eve. I’m just used to working on my birthday, so I’ll be celebrating it afterward.
Expectancy is the atmosphere for miracles.
‘Make your plate look like a Christmas tree,’ I tell people, ‘mostly green with splashes of other bright colors.’
My father died when I was young and I was raised by my grandmother, Emma Klonjlaleh Brown. We could afford to eat chicken just once a year, on Christmas.
In the minds of a Liberal, someone who isn’t Christian might be offended if we say Merry Christmas to them, so we shouldn’t say Merry Christmas to anyone. The logic is bizarre!
When I was eight, my mum found me humming to myself and scribbling on a scrap of paper. When she asked me what I was doing, I got shy. I was writing a Christmas song, and I had never shared my music with anyone before. Reluctantly, I sang it for her… and she loved it. Of course she did – she’s my mum.
When I was a child, I was living in the housing projects of Philadelphia. I didn’t even have a Christmas tree.
Lyndon B. Johnson thought he’d have the boys home from Vietnam by Christmas – for four Christmases in a row (he never shifted course, and lost his presidency for it).
I loved ‘White Christmas’ for the music aspect. I was into musical theater.
Don’t send funny greeting cards on birthdays or at Christmas. Save them for funerals, when their cheery effect is needed.
You don’t want your jewelry to make you look fat. A lot of what’s out there now does – you just wind up looking like a Christmas tree.
I’m a physicist, and we have something called Moore’s Law, which says computer power doubles every 18 months. So every Christmas, we more or less assume that our toys and appliances are more or less twice as powerful as the previous Christmas.
Christmas is a season for kindling the fire for hospitality in the hall, the genial flame of charity in the heart.
I love the excitement, the childlike spirit of innocence and just about everything that goes along with Christmas.
I once bought my kids a set of batteries for Christmas with a note on it saying, toys not included.
My grandmother did all the cooking at Christmas. We ate fattened chicken. We would feed it even more so it would be big and fat.
My garden in England is full of eating-out places, for heat waves, warm September evenings, or lunch on a frosty Christmas morning.
Halloween is my favorite holiday. It’s like my Christmas.
‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’ are movies we love with magic in them.
I put the copy of ‘A Christmas Carol’ that my grandfather had first read to me 60 years ago on my desk, and I began to write. The result, for better or for worse, is the ‘Christmas Spirits.’ I plan to read it to my grandson.
I’d rather do community service than sit and write a load of Christmas cards.
My family know not to get me any tech for Christmas. I can never get it to work, and it all becomes very tearful and pressurised.
I’ve taught fifth-year Christmas leavers last thing on a Friday afternoon. Basically, if you can face that you can face anything.
But Tammy Faye calls me, and Ron Jeremy calls me, Erik Estrada sends me a Christmas card every year.
Christmas is a great time to recommit to each other and our communities.
The earth has grown old with its burden of care, but at Christmas it always is young, the heart of the jewel burns lustrous and fair, and its soul full of music breaks the air, when the song of angels is sung.
If you haven’t got any charity in your heart, you have the worst kind of heart trouble.
To me, it remains incomprehensible that a people who can design the Porsche 911 and sleek, white ice trains, who created the Bauhaus and speak at least three languages at birth, want to own twee Christmas figurines painted in gaudy colours, dress up in Bavarian lederhosen, and eat Haribo gummy bears.
Wonderful Christmas Time’ is a Christmas song but it was supposed to be an attempt at a traditional song.
You can separate the church and state all you like, but Christmas is inescapable, and it’s marvellous, and it’s not going away.
I’d like to do a Christmas album. I’ve never done a Christmas album.
Christmas, children, is not a date. It is a state of mind.
I’ve played D&D for years. I’m a comic book guy. Comic-Con in San Diego is nerd Christmas for me.
Christmas is the perfect time to celebrate the love of God and family and to create memories that will last forever. Jesus is God’s perfect, indescribable gift. The amazing thing is that not only are we able to receive this gift, but we are able to share it with others on Christmas and every other day of the year.
When I grew up, we always had our chickens, and we ate our eggs, and we ate our chickens. The family always had a pig, and we would kill it at Christmas and eat it for three or four months afterwards.
I like day-after-Christmas omelets, day-after Christmas pizzas… Or you take croissant rolls, put gravy on top, turkey, mashed potatoes, cheese, more gravy. That sounds good!
The truth is that our way of celebrating the Christmas season does spring from myriad cultures and sources, from St. Nicholas to Coca-Cola advertising campaigns.
I love giving gifts and I love receiving them. I really like giving little kids extravagant gifts. You see their little faces light up and they get excited. If it’s a really good gift, I love receiving it, like jewels, small islands.
I love Halloween. I love Thanksgiving. I love Christmas. I love New Year’s.
Every Christmas, I cook an elaborate Mexican dinner.
My dad’s a firefighter, so I know what it’s like for policemen and firefighters to be on their own on Christmas Day.
I eat everything I want on Christmas day. I really don’t watch what I eat. It’s not like you have Christmas every day!
I got given a pair of Christmas socks with penguins on. They know you’re obviously not going to wear them. I think they do it just to annoy you, to be honest.
I don’t think Christmas is necessarily about things. It’s about being good to one another, it’s about the Christian ethic, it’s about kindness.
I have a good house for hosting, so we had the barbecues, and some of the guys over for Thanksgiving, even Christmas.
I have a musical called Goodbye and Good Luck, based on a Grace Paley short story. I also have King Island Christmas, and there are 20 different productions of it this year.
People say I don’t write books, I make Christmas presents.
I am one of those people who is not very patient in the makeup chair. I have been offered movies like ‘Planet of the Apes’ and stuff like ‘The Grinch Who Stole Christmas’ and I turned them down.
I intend to keep writing Christmas songs. There’s still a lot more about Christmas that can be captured and feel like old-time Christmas. A lot of the traditions haven’t been explained in song.
When I met Letterman, he told me he thought ‘Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)’ was the greatest Christmas song he ever heard, and he wanted me to be on his show to sing it.
Christmas in L.A. is weird. There’s no snow. It’s not even cold.
One Christmas I had no money, and so I went home and just, like, wrote a poem; I mean, I didn’t write them, but I just handed out poems as Christmas presents. Like, ‘Here’s a Pablo Neruda poem that really made me think of you.’
Every day is like Halloween or Christmas eve for me. I go to bed, and I’m so excited to get back to work. I’m very lucky that I have a career like that ’cause not many people do.
I feel like I’ve got a pretty relatively extensive Christmas sweatshirt collection.
Every Christmas should begin with the sound of bells, and when I was a child mine always did. But they were sleigh bells, not church bells, for we lived in a part of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where there were no churches.
Lately I did a film called All I Want for Christmas and it was well received. This gave me a new point of view and a new respect for my work as an actress.
I get a little behind during Lent, but it comes out even at Christmas.
A Christian’s celebration of Christmas should be a lot different from that of nonbelievers.
I once did a gig at an office Christmas party in the showroom floor of a friend’s father’s home appliance shop in the suburbs of Melbourne. It was to a much older crowd. Without a microphone. Or a stage. With the queue for the buffet behind me.
I once wanted to become an atheist, but I gave up – they have no holidays.
The Christian faith can never be separated from the soil of sacred events, from the choice made by God, who wanted to speak to us, to become man, to die and rise again, in a particular place and at a particular time.
For more than a decade, I led an organization that put on an elaborate Christmas program each December. It was a big production, with over 250 people participating in more than 20 performances. By the end of the season, everyone who participated was exhausted.
Christmas, my child, is love in action. Every time we love, every time we give, it’s Christmas.
I did ‘Christmas Carol’ off and on through my teenage years, so I always had that dialect and that sound in my ear, which was so helpful. It became second nature.
‘The Christmas Song,’ by Nat King Cole, is not only a masterful performance; to me it just sounds like the holidays. I’ve never sung it, because Nat’s version is so perfect. I gotta leave it alone.
I was a public aid recipient for about nine years as a kid, and this time of year was always tough sledding, so I just committed myself to doing something good for someone at Thanksgiving, and especially Christmas.
One of the most glorious messes in the world is the mess created in the living room on Christmas day. Don’t clean it up too quickly.
There’s a little Christmas in all of us, I guess. Even in me.
My urge at Christmas time or Hanukkah-time or Kwanzaa-time is that people go to bookstores: that they walk around bookstores and look at the shelves. Go to look for authors that they’ve loved in the past and see what else those authors have written.
When I was five my parents bought me a ukulele for Christmas. I quickly learned how to play it with my father’s guidance. Thereafter, my father regularly taught me all the good old fashioned songs.
Every gift which is given, even though it be small, is in reality great, if it is given with affection.
I love singing Christmas carols. I know every harmony to every music-hall Christmas song.
I simply believe food is too good to throw away – and Christmas leftovers can be a gastronomic opportunity for the well-skilled kitchen forager. With a little imagination, there are a million ways to use up leftovers rather than bin them.
Christmas for me means starting the day with ackee and saltfish, and cornbread muffins.
Yep, I’m a geek. Ever since I got the Millennium Falcon for Christmas in 1978. And I still have it, in perfect condition, just without the box… but I still play with it!
If I’m getting on an airplane or anywhere, really, I have a lunch box and stuff. It’s a running joke with my friends and family – everyone gives me lunch boxes for Christmas.
I don’t like most Christmas movies. They’re pretty bad, though they seem to make tons of money anyway. Like this movie ‘Elf,’ I got the script for that, and I turned it down right away. Against my wife’s better judgment.
Christmas is a stocking stuffed with sugary goodness.
I’ve never had a cold Christmas, as I always spend it back home in Australia.
I get a little behind during Lent, but it comes out even at Christmas.
The best thing about doing those Hallmark movies is my dad loves them. My dad watches all of those Christmas movies, not just ones I’m in. He watches them all, so the first one I did, it was like my Christmas present to my dad.
I have to confess that I’ve never been a great fan of Christmas or, as it’s known in our house, The Monster That Ate the Last Third of the Year. It’s mostly the rampant consumerism I object to, but I’m also a little wary of the annual crop of new Christmas stories and sometimes wonder why anyone bothers.
I really want a Christmas in New York one year, when it’s snowing. Like, it’s Christmas morning, and you have a fight with someone, and you run down the street, and it’s snowing, and you can’t find them.
I grew up drinking eggnog and watching ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’ every Christmas with my family.
Christmas is the day that holds all time together.
I built my church on Easter services, Christmas Eve services, and Norman Vincent Peale.
Christmas… is not an external event at all, but a piece of one’s home that one carries in one’s heart.
I was once part of a Christmas cabaret. I sang ‘I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.’ I tap-danced. I had a ten-gallon hat. It was quite absurd.
A barn with cattle and horses is the place to begin Christmas; after all, that’s where the original event happened, and that same smell was the first air that the Christ Child breathed.
Christmas coming means one thing for comedians: office party gigs!
My mother, she had a very good attitude toward money. I’m very grateful for the fact that we had to learn to save. I used to get like 50 pence a week, and I’d save it for like five months. And then I’d spend it on Christmas presents. I’d save up like eight pounds. It’s nothing, but we did that.
I picked up the guitar at 12 yrs old – basically, my mother and father bought it for me for Christmas. I played one at my friend’s house; when I say played it, I just played around with it at my friend’s house. It just struck me as something I really wanted.
‘Joker’ was a violent, dark, and brutal book, so I wanted to do something a little less heavy. I played around with the idea of a children’s book, and that eventually became ‘Noel.’ And I just kept finding these parallels between things I could do with Batman and Charles Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol.’
I got a .30-30 for Christmas in the seventh grade. It wasn’t what I asked for, by the way.
Before we took down the tree each year, Dad would always say a prayer that we would be together the next Christmas. I cling to that prayer, which serves as a reminder that it’s important to be grateful in the present for the people you love because, well, you never know.
It’s fun when you start a movie, because it’s kind of like you get to go Christmas shopping… you get to make your wish list and you start thinking about what each character needs.
Besides Christianity and specifically Catholicism being wonderful, Christmas is intrinsic to American culture and worth defending. Think of what happens at Christmas time. People play Mariah Carey Christmas songs… What else do you need in life?
Dad bought me a toy drum one Christmas, and I eventually destroyed it. I wanted a real drum and he bought me a snare drum. Dad continued to buy me one drum after the other.
In France, Christmas is a family holiday. You stay home. New Year’s Eve is when you go out.
In terms of the first Christmas when I met everybody, I went over to Nick’s grandfather’s house where they were having the big Christmas dinner, and they have this tradition of this thing called oyster stew.
One thing I hear a lot is, ‘Dude, my mom loves your record,’ or ‘I got it for my dad for Christmas.’ I’m essentially doing dad rock. Which is great, because I love Steely Dan, you know? Nothing wrong with dad rock!
Songs that aren’t even remotely connected to Christmas are now officially canonized Christmas tunes. ‘Frosty the Snowman,’ ‘Jingle Bells’ and ‘Winter Wonderland’ never mention anything religious but are still notches in Christmas’ belt of musical dominance.
A good conscience is a continual Christmas.
The term ‘natural resources’ confuses people. ‘Natural resources’ are not like a finite number of gifts under the Christmas tree. Nature is given, but resources are created.
I think that there are a lot of really beautiful Christmas carols, and then sometimes there are horrible renditions of them that are played to death in malls that make me sad. I try to avoid stores where they’re playing bad versions of Christmas songs on repeat.
Besides the two Christmas things, we’ve got a about a dozen new tracks we’re working on.
I’ve got more than 600 pairs of Ray-Ban sunglasses, from 1950s originals to newer models. I have them on the wall like opticians do so I can pick out a pair that goes with my outfit. I had around 30 pairs, then my husband Rainer started getting them for me as birthday and Christmas gifts.
Christopher Walken and Nathalie Baye played my parents so well that I really thought I was in my living room at Christmas. My mother couldn’t have been played more correctly.
Godot is whatever it is in life that you are waiting for: ‘I’m waiting to win the lottery. I’m waiting to fall in love’. For me, as a child, it was Christmas. At least that eventually came.
I’d just got back from filming my role as Flo in ‘Kidnap & Ransom’ when I got the news that Channel 4 had re-commissioned ‘Fresh Meat,’ so I think it was the first Christmas I could actually relax knowing that I had three months’ work sorted. As an actor, that’s always a good feeling.
When we went to see the first rough cuts of ‘Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence,’ I fell to the floor because my acting was so bad. I wrote music to compensate for my bad acting.
I love Christmas. I’m totally the ‘decorate early, start listening to Christmas songs super-early’ guy.
Everyone should see ‘A Nightmare Before Christmas,’ hear ‘London Calling,’ and read ‘Great Expectations.’
Christmas is a bridge. We need bridges as the river of time flows past. Today’s Christmas should mean creating happy hours for tomorrow and reliving those of yesterday.
We filmed part of it here at the Alex Theatre in Los Angeles, and then we filmed the other part of it in Oklahoma because that’s where I live. It’s called ‘Darci Lynne: My Hometown Christmas.’ We wanted to incorporate that I celebrate Christmas just like any other kid.
What I don’t like about office Christmas parties is looking for a job the next day.
One Christmas, when Freddie and I were flatmates in Kensington, we were trying to cook Christmas dinner, but all we had was a packet of bread sauce that you make with water. We used to dream of a can of beans.
I love Halloween, trick or treating and decorating the house. And I love Thanksgiving, because of the football and the fall weather. And of course, I love Christmas – that’s my favorite of all!
A good conscience is a continual Christmas.
When I was five years old, I auditioned for the role of ‘Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol.’
Christmas music is usually more concentrated pop music in a way. It’s meant to make us feel good, and it’s meant to make us like we belong somewhere.
Our last jam session was this past Christmas. Dad played his harmonica, mom sang in English and Italian, and I played guitar. I’m so happy that we could share that musical experience for one last time.
You have to remind kids to stay connected to the meaning of Christmas. Sometimes it takes a little bit of effort, but it’s so worth it.
I think that ‘Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance’ was mentally taxing, if only because I had to go to a Christmas party shortly after I had wrapped photography in Romania at two in the morning as the Ghost Rider. The invitation had a Christmas ornament on it with Ghost Rider’s face on it as a tree.
I always wanted to write for children. When I was growing up, we were really poor. My mother had left, and it was all a mess. So I lived in my head a lot, and I would get lots of books for Christmas – from librarians and teachers – and they just fed my imagination.
Over the years, I’ve heard pop artists do some Christmas songs, and I haven’t fully cared for them. They weren’t the traditional Christmas music that I was raised on and love. Thinking of that, I wanted to make my songs mimic the classic Christmas songs.
When I was a child in England before the war, Christmas pudding always contained at least one shiny new sixpence, and it was considered a sign of great good luck for the new year to find one in your helping of the pudding.
Christmas carols always brought tears to my eyes. I also cry at weddings. I should have cried at a couple of my own.
I’ve always been the one who is more enthusiastic about Christmas than my family. I regress to a child state, chanting carols.
I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six. Mother took me to see him in a department store and he asked for my autograph.
The loneliest ebb of my life came on that Christmas eve, only one day after my arrival in New York. The abyss of loneliness. I ate a solitary dinner in a small cafe, and the very food tasted bitter with my unshed tears. One doesn’t dare cry in America. It is unmanly here.
For much of my adult life, I believed, inaccurately, that I knew the story of Charles Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol’ – that I remembered it from childhood.
‘A Tuna Christmas’ is the second in a series of plays created by Joe Sears and Jaston Williams featuring the fictional town of Greater Tuna, the third-smallest town in Texas. What makes these plays so hysterically funny is the accurate portrayal of small-town life in the Lone Star State.
I think I’m a lot like other moms out there who feel like if we don’t have the pecan pie we have every year, then it just won’t be Christmas.
From me growing up with a large family and everybody singing around the Christmas tree, it was a wonderful, wonderful upbringing.
Christmas is, of course, the time to be home – in heart as well as body.
One Christmas, Dennis Dermody, the movie critic of ‘Paper,’ gave me ‘Rock Hudson: A Gathering of Friends,’ the master invitation list from Rock Hudson’s memorial service. It’s so great. Everyone’s in it, with personal addresses all bound into a book. Someone else once gave me Ike Turner’s will. I get great stuff.
I love cooking during Christmas, all smells like the hot apple cider, the hot spiced wine.
‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’ is my number one biggest influence artistically in every way.
And of course there’s so much music in and around our family. I had a piano during Christmas because it’s obviously useful through the season. There are so many people, songwriters, who are around.
I never really did Christmas before. Christmas Day? I mean – what’s that? What’s it all about? I was always flying on Christmas Day.
I did Christmas plays at school, but they banned me because I was messing about. And I was like, ‘Ah, why?’ Because I was getting attention, everyone was laughing at me and I was loving it, I thought, ‘This feels good!’
I’m totally the ‘decorate early, start listening to Christmas songs super early’ guy. I’ve just always been that way.
I understand Christmas, and I understand Easter. But Halloween is one of those things where, if you don’t grow with it? The French, they tried Halloween for a few years, and I think they’re dropping it.
Felixstowe, the United Kingdom’s largest port, stops work only for Christmas Day and for crane-toppling Force 9 gales.
That’s the true spirit of Christmas; people being helped by people other than me.
Every year we celebrate the holy season of Advent, O God. Every year we pray those beautiful prayers of longing and waiting, and sing those lovely songs of hope and promise.
Christmas is the biggest holiday in numbers – in terms of gross amounts – because you have one and a half to two months.
Isn’t that the great thing about Christmas? You get a lot of respite, time to recharge your batteries, time with family without too much else happening anywhere else in the world, time to focus on the people you love and the activities that you enjoy, time to exercise, to read.
I think Christmas is about celebration and come on, on the inside everyone wants to dance.
At Christmas, ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ makes me cry in exactly the same places every time, even though I know it’s coming.
I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six. Mother took me to see him in a department store and he asked for my autograph.
The thing about Christmas is that it almost doesn’t matter what mood you’re in or what kind of a year you’ve had – it’s a fresh start.
If you haven’t got any charity in your heart, you have the worst kind of heart trouble.
I grew up as a photo nut. Every Christmas I would get a new camera. It’s a huge part of my life.
I’m still a Chicagoan in the fact that I can’t do Christmas with sand and palm trees. It just doesn’t compute – it’s not Christmas unless your face hurts when you step outside.
I’m well-travelled so I can see places coming up. I went to St. Croix in the West Indies at Christmas and it had been hit by a really bad tornado. Values there have gone down but I guarantee they will be up again in eight years. So I’ll get in now while it’s cheap as chips.
I did a Christmas movie where I played Mrs. Claus because my children’s favorite movie of all time was a Christmas movie that my father did in which he played Santa, and I was like, ‘How often do they make a movie about Mrs. Claus?’ and, ‘My kids will love this.’
The main reason Santa is so jolly is because he knows where all the bad girls live.
Our whole family assembles in Chicago at Christmas and usually in Aspen in the summer.
Christmas to me, obviously, basketball is very important to me, but there are some days of the year where it’s got to take a back seat to something.
Even though we’re a week and a half away from Thanksgiving, it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.
I’ve got a quad copter on my Christmas list, as I suspect quite a few people do.
I love the excitement, the childlike spirit of innocence and just about everything that goes along with Christmas.
I make a huge batch of cinnamon buns on Christmas Eve and bake them off early Christmas morning.
I love what they do with ‘Doctor Who,’ where they have the series, and then they do a big Christmas movie special.
T’was the night before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
Coming from Chicago, I like a white Christmas.
I love Christmas tree bulbs, and I started putting them in my paintings. You’ve got to plug this painting in, and it’s got a rig in the back, so that each one can be replaced if it burns out.
Every Christmas Eve, the elves will come and give us a new pair of pajamas.
I wouldn’t recommend young kids see ‘Speedway Junkie.’ It’s definitely an age-appropriate movie – dark and realistic and edgy. If young kids want to see me, go see the Christmas movie.
I am a veteran of the War on Christmas. I am just emerging from a battlefield strewn with dead trees and torn shreds of brightly colored wrapping paper.
It’s hard to pinpoint, but there’s something really special about all-vocal music and Christmas music paired together. I’m not really sure what it is, but it’s just a magical combination.
The best Christmas that l had was probably when I got my Xbox. When I first got an Xbox, it was, like, the very first Xbox when it came out.
Nothing says holidays, like a cheese log.
Things change; your priorities change in life. So I’d never think of riding 100 miles on Christmas Day now, because I’ve got two kids, and it’s selfish.
When we’re in London my family goes to mass on Christmas Eve. The next day Dad cooks the turkey on the barbecue, standing outside in the freezing cold.
Christmas waves a magic wand over this world, and behold, everything is softer and more beautiful.
Chum was a British boy’s weekly which, at the end of the year was bound into a single huge book; and the following Christmas parents bought it as Christmas presents for male children.
Now that I’m an adult and have a big say in what we eat on Christmas Day, turkey doesn’t even make it on to the starting grid for consideration. It isn’t just my least favourite meat; it’s my least favourite protein.
Music is my thing. It’s my thing; it’s what I love. It’s what I do. It’s football to me; it’s Christmas to me; religion to me; poetry to me.
Why is there an end of the year? Because the calendar imposes numerical order on time. There is a natural fitness in the celebration of the New Year, a holiday of numbers imposed on things, with lists, as well as with Advent calendars and songs like ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas.’
I love giving gifts. It’s almost like I don’t open my gifts until, like, three days after Christmas ’cause I want to give everyone else their presents.
If I’m ever stuck on the M25 – the ‘Road to Hell’ – I’ll wind the window down and start singing, ‘I’m driving home for Christmas’ at people in cars alongside. They love it. It’s like giving them a present.
You are not practicing Judaism if you celebrate Christmas.
The worst gift that I ever gave a girl was a suitcase for Christmas. As in, ‘I can’t think of anything to give you, but here’s a new suitcase.’ Afterward, I was like, ‘What were you thinking, idiot?’
The only thing I liked about Christmas as a kid was the gifts; otherwise, it just seemed like a stressful time.
There are a lot of Grinches out there that would like nothing better than to take any references to religion out of the holiday season.
My mom and dad always tried to make Christmas special for us. We were poor, but it’s funny because we had no idea.
Maybe Christmas, the Grinch thought, doesn’t come from a store.
When you have kids, you instantly feel that you do not want to do them wrong. Those dads that go off to Florida and start a new life, I couldn’t imagine that: seeing my kid once every Christmas, every three years. If I’m gone for six days it feels like too much.
There would be no Christmas if there was no Easter.
When I was really young, I loved the movie ‘White Christmas’ – I still do – and I thought Rosemary Clooney was so pretty. When I was, like, nine, I would tell people, ‘You know who I kind of look like? Rosemary Clooney.’
One thing I love about Christmas music is that it has a tradition of warmth.
I want to go to Lapland and see Father Christmas, and now I’ve got a child, so I’ve got an excuse. Also, I’d like to go to South America especially as I’m now living in that part of the world, in L.A. now. And I must get down to Mexico.
People think it’s terribly sad to spend Christmas alone, but it’s no sadder, really, than spending any other day alone, is it?
Mail your packages early so the post office can lose them in time for Christmas.
I remember being banned from other houses as a younger child during the winter holiday season; I was the only one who didn’t believe in Santa Claus, and I was ruining everyone’s Christmas.
Orphans, dead parents, lonely children at Christmas, morose spoken word recordings, everything you love about the holidays. Move the turkey over so you can fit your head in the oven.
I’m one of those people who had Christmas and my birthday always combined, and generally, my birthday was pretty much ignored. But my parents are always good about making some kind of special effort to make me feel like I also have a birthday that exists.
I was at the vice president’s Christmas party. I thought that his speech was spectacular, and I knew that it was a very emotional and difficult thing for him to do, but I admonished him for not waiting just one more stinking day.
I made a French film called ‘Merry Christmas’ which is a very European film. It’s a World War I piece.
I’ve always loved watches. It’s been the one thing that I’ve asked for, whether it was every Christmas or a birthday.
I think if you buy the ‘Christmas Queens 2’ album, there will be songs you love and songs you hate, just like every other album.
Once I found out that I was playing ‘Deathlok,’ I unearthed my old comic book collection. I was going home for Christmas, and I have a collection of thousands of comics. I was surprised to see that 90% of them were Marvel. So, I wanted to go through my collection and start there.
Like my dad, I have a Christmas party most years. I like to celebrate and see as many people as possible.
I get very unsettled by the mess of Christmas. I find the decorations a little bit hard, as my desire for everything to match is never fully satisfied.
According to an ancient Sardinian legend, the bodies of those who are born on Christmas Eve will never dissolve into dust but are preserved until the end of time.
It’s quite a famous story that takes place on Christmas Eve, and the Germans, French, and Scottish are trying to make peace one night and they bury their dead and they play football. I play a German opera singer, in German, which I never have so I am really excited about that.
Every gift which is given, even though it be small, is in reality great, if it is given with affection.
We grew up probably having as hard a life as anybody. A lot of times, we didn’t have any food on the table. At Christmas, everybody else would always get something nice, but we’d get one T-shirt or one shirt… So I want to take care of Mom and Dad… and I’m having a damn good time doing it.
I don’t like to see Christmas trees torn down.
My mother would give my brothers and me a pile of catalogues and let us pick what we wanted for Christmas.
Christmas always rustled. It rustled every time, mysteriously, with silver and gold paper, tissue paper and a rich abundance of shiny paper, decorating and hiding everything and giving a feeling of reckless extravagance.
For Christmas every year, my mother used to give me those cheap little diaries that would tell your horoscope and provide a little blank slot for each day.
My favorite traditional Christmas movie that I like to watch is All Quiet on the Western Front. It’s just not December without that movie in my house.
When it comes to referring to Dickens’s life, performing plays with your nine children for friends and family during Christmas is Dickensian.
When ‘I’m Sorry’ came out and became such a huge hit, that made ‘Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree’ start selling. Then that became a huge, huge hit.
My mother was a professional sick person; she took a lot of pain pills. There are many people like that. It’s just how they are used to getting attention. I always remember she’s the daughter of alcoholics who’d leave her alone at Christmas time.
I do have a family, and I do have friends, and so-called friends, and acquaintances, and many other people I see only around Christmas time. Maybe they could vouch for me. Maybe they could testify to my existence and save a part of me that thinks I’m no better than a bag of potato chips.
Tax cuts should be for life, not just for Christmas.
South Park started as a little video Christmas card.
I still get up every morning at 4 A.M. I write seven days a week, including Christmas. And I still face a blank page every morning, and my characters don’t really care how many books I’ve sold.
Christmas for me is all about spending time with my family. I cherish any chance we have to spend all day together making gingerbread houses, baking cookies, or sitting around and watching movies.
During the first 13 centuries after the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, no one thought of setting up a creche to celebrate Christmas. The pre-eminent Christian holiday was Easter, not Christmas.
Don’t give me books for Christmas; I already have a book.
Christmas and the holidays are the season of giving. It’s a time when people are more kind and open-hearted.
Mum and Dad used to do a lot of entertaining. We had quite a nice house, so everybody descended on us at Christmas – aunts and uncles, who weren’t even aunts and uncles.
The first story I can remember writing, that I truly set down on paper, was a Christmas story that I wrote when I was ten years old.
No matter what else is going on, Christmas is my all-time favorite period in the year. It has a positive effect on me like very little else does, seasonally, that is.
Christmas is more stressful with present buying and making sure everyone gets included, but Thanksgiving is really not that. I don’t ever really get stressed out about the food.
I worked for a big department store, and strangely, on my first day, they put me in charge of Christmas wrapping. I didn’t know how to wrap a present and make it not look like it fell off a truck.
Christmas was the one time of year when my brothers surfaced at home, when my parents and grandparents congregated to eat my mother’s roast turkey.
I like to spend Christmas with family and friends, pigging out, exchanging gifts and basically doing nothing.
Being a traditionalist, I’m a rabid sucker for Christmas. In July, I’m already worried that there are only 146 shopping days left.
I would like to go back and spend a Christmas with my family and myself when I was five years old and just see what that dynamic would be like. Observe it. I think it would be a magical gift.
It doesn’t bother me a bit when people say, ‘Merry Christmas’ to me. I don’t think they are slighting me or getting ready to put me in a ghetto. In fact, I kind of like it.
Just recently, I thought about how maybe I should have kept using the synthesisers more after ‘Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence’; then, I would have been a more unique soundtrack composer than I am now. It could have been my signature. But then, probably, Bertolucci would not have offered me to compose for his films.
The Supreme Court has ruled that they cannot have a nativity scene in Washington, D.C. This wasn’t for any religious reasons. They couldn’t find three wise men and a virgin.
I think we need one recognized, respected public figure to make a tough, blunt statement on just what Reagan’s record is and what he might do to the country, let alone the Republican Party before Christmas.
My mom is a really good cook. I didn’t get the cooking gene, but she cooks this really amazing dinner every Christmas, and that’s always really fun.
As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly, when they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky. So up to the house-top the coursers they flew, with the sleigh full of toys, and St. Nicholas too.
My mom used to keep all her Christmas cards in a basket bedecked with red ribbon, and I loved to look at them all and read all the letters.
Christmas brings us great music: Everything from Handel’s ‘Messiah’ to ‘White Christmas,’ to ‘I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.’
Deep in my cortex, the year is divided into reading seasons. The period from mid-October to Christmas, for instance, is ‘ghost story’ time, while Jane Austen and P. G. Wodehouse pretty much own April and May.
Most people think to make green bean casserole around Thanksgiving and Christmas, but honestly, I make this dish more during the summer, when green beans can be found fresh at the market. I think it is the perfect meal when served with crusty bread, a bountiful salad, and a cup or two of wine.
It will be a hard game if you think about winning a championship. We need to think about our own game at the moment and focus on getting good results especially over the Christmas period.
I asked for a guitar when I was 8 years old for Christmas. I have no idea why. I never had any guitar heroes. I still don’t. But there must have been something in me because I’ve been playing for 30 years.
I grew up believing in Santa Claus, and we still treat our house at Christmas with a huge reverence for that belief – even though our children are 19 through 23.
I’m writing a book called ‘The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus’ about the maths of Christmas: how to set up a secret Santa so it’s totally fair; how to decorate your tree mathematically; how to win at Monopoly.
The first music I was ever exposed to was Irish folk music, like the Clancy Brothers. My father plays that and Christmas songs.
I was doing a tour of the ‘Batman’ live stage production, and I challenged the cast to join me to run. One time, we were running in Switzerland just before Christmas, and it was heavy snow. Another time, we were running down the Seine in Paris on Christmas Day, and we all had Santa hats on.
Christmas is not a time nor a season, but a state of mind. To cherish peace and goodwill, to be plenteous in mercy, is to have the real spirit of Christmas.
You know how on Christmas day, the day feels different, even if you’re just sitting in your chair waiting for your girlfriend to put her face on and you haven’t even started any of the festivities yet, the day still feels different. The electrons are fatter and pushier.
I’m learning Spanish – I got Rosetta Stone for Christmas.
I am a bit of a mother hen at Christmas! I always prepare in advance. It is the only way; otherwise, it can be really daunting.
In the spring of 1994 I decided not to seek reelection to the Senate. I had made the decision 12 years earlier, Christmas Day of 1982, just after I had been first elected to a full term, that I would do the best I could for a limited time.
I grew up asking for everything under the sun for Christmas, but I knew I wasn’t going to get it all.
And know that I am with you always; yes, to the end of time.
I love the royal family. I even got up in the middle of the night to watch Kate and William’s wedding. And I never miss the Queen’s speech on Christmas Day. I feel it’s my duty as an English-born woman to watch.
People have nannies and big cars, and they want to go to Maui for Christmas. When there are those kind of stakes involved, people get ruthless.
Christmas is my favorite holiday because you spend time with family. I love the decorations, the music, and buying gifts for people. Everything about Christmas is the best.
One thing I’ve always loved and rated me dad for is that, because of him, I’ve never seen the Queen’s Christmas speech.
Unless we make Christmas an occasion to share our blessings, all the snow in Alaska won’t make it ‘white’.
I celebrate everything. We always had a menorah and a Christmas tree – not for any reason other than we always liked celebrating things.
I grew up with the classics. My mom and I would sit and watch ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ and ‘White Christmas’ – those kind of movies.
Don’t let the past steal your present. This is the message of Christmas: We are never alone.
The cheese board is my big treat at Christmas that I have to deny myself during the rest of year.
Christmas and Thanksgiving are the two days of the year where we know the spurs are going to stay off the boots because the family doesn’t have to work. It’s such a nice – and rare – treat!
It is never too late to get into tennis! While I started playing at the age of 8 when my parents gave me a tennis racquet for Christmas, tennis is a lifelong sport that can be enjoyed by people of almost any age. It’s also something you never forget once you learn.
The main reason Santa is so jolly is because he knows where all the bad girls live.
The word of God is very important to Christmas. For unto us a child was born, and we should be reminded of how Christ’s amazing journey came to be.
December used to be very difficult for me. For many years, I fought the transition to the new year, was generally exhausted at the end of the year, and just wanted to hide. I described myself as a ‘cranky Jewish kid who felt left out by Christmas.’
There are some people who want to throw their arms round you simply because it is Christmas; there are other people who want to strangle you simply because it is Christmas.
Christmas in Bethlehem. The ancient dream: a cold, clear night made brilliant by a glorious star, the smell of incense, shepherds and wise men falling to their knees in adoration of the sweet baby, the incarnation of perfect love.
I’ve not cooked Christmas dinner since 1982.
Finding the real joy of Christmas comes not in the hurrying and the scurrying to get more done, nor is it found in the purchasing of gifts. We find real joy when we make the Savior the focus of the season.
Pets, like their owners, tend to expand a little over the Christmas period.
We have a host of English teachers in the family. My mum is an English teacher, and so are my dad, my aunt and my uncle. I have grown up with family writing competitions, and I can’t remember a birthday or Christmas present that didn’t include books.
I still have the Triumph Palm Beach I was given for Christmas when I was 11. By today’s standards, it is heavy and slow, but was my pride and joy at the time.
I love ‘White Christmas.’ That’s one of my favorites just because I love the music. I love the story, Bing Crosby. It’s just one of my all time favorites. And it’s hard to have a Christmas without seeing a little bit of Jimmy Stewart and angels running around town.
When you’re involved in those big-budget movies, there’s a lot of hype: ‘Oh this is gonna be a big hit!’ And ‘A Christmas Story’ wasn’t. It came and went and was a big disappointment at the box office.
When I was a kid, I really wanted a metal detector for Christmas, convinced I was going to find buried treasure and could retire at 12. Santa Claus brought me one, but sadly, that treasure was never realized. It’s amazing how many bottle caps you have to dig up. But to be honest, that dream is still alive.
When you spend such a large portion of your life working – and it’s not fun, and you’re worried about getting sued or fired for saying the wrong thing or for acting crazy at a work party – then what has work done to America? That’s the impetus to have a huge office Christmas party.
Christmas is a Christian holiday, and any self-respecting person of another religion should not celebrate a holiday that they don’t believe in. Clearly, Christ is in the name of the holiday, so there should be a belief in Him.
My mom loved my Christmas music, so I did an awful lot of it!
Seeing the actual ‘The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe’, I absolutely loved it. It became one of my favourite films. It was a real Christmas classic, and it was one of the most popular films ever in British history.
The supernatural birth of Christ, his miracles, his resurrection and ascension, remain eternal truths, whatever doubts may be cast on their reality as historical facts.
I got a guitar when I was about 14, for a Christmas present, and went from there.
I love snow; I love building snowman. The only thing I don’t like is the cold – so if we could have a hot Christmas, that would be amazing.
When I was a kid, we would get McDonalds on Christmas Eve, and that was a big deal because the closest one to the south side of Chicago was a 35 minute drive away. I remember opening the bag and smelling those fries, and even now when I smell them, it reminds me of Christmas Eve.
I was thrilled one year when I was younger when not only did my brothers get hockey sticks for Christmas – but I did too!
Halloween is bigger than Christmas in America. I’ve experienced it in New York, Los Angeles and Washington D.C., and if you’re in the right neighbourhood, every house is decorated with spooky ghosts, spider webs, and jack-o-lanterns.
Actually, my mother and Alfie came for three weeks’ Christmas vacation and stayed for 21 years. I guess my mother never went back because she was lonely.
I used to sing in church, too. Not like in the choir or anything, but for people around the church… on the church bus going home and Christmas plays.
I grew up in a reform Jewish family in St. Louis. Our idea of Judaism was no bar mitzvahs and a Christmas tree that had a skirt at the bottom embroidered with the names of my grandparents.
It is a fine seasoning for joy to think of those we love.
There I am, watching Philip Seymour Hoffman, one of my favourite actors in the world, walk into the room dressed up as Father Christmas, being hilarious, and I’m suddenly thinking, ‘Where am I?’
Throughout history, Hanukkah was a relatively minor festival, but it’s become very popular in America due to its proximity to Christmas.
My father was born on Christmas Day in 1934. He grew up in what is now part of North Korea. When the Korean War began, my father was 16, and he found passage on an American refugee ship,thinking he’d be gone for just a few days, but he never saw his mother or his sister again.
He put a ring in the toe of a stocking. On Christmas Eve, we opened our stockings and it was there at the bottom of the toe. Then he got down on his knees and he was shaking.
I do love Christmas, although my wife puts me to shame. She is a huge Christmas fan, so we do love us some Christmas in our house.
The earth has grown old with its burden of care, but at Christmas it always is young, the heart of the jewel burns lustrous and fair, and its soul full of music breaks the air, when the song of angels is sung.
And know that I am with you always; yes, to the end of time.
During the holidays, everyone needs a break from studying for exams and Christmas shopping. I wanted to put together a diverse tour that rocks in many musical directions but always points to Christ.
I write in my house, at my desk, where I have Christmas lights strung over it to try and convince me that I’m having a good time. I can’t really write anywhere else.
Now, the essence, the very spirit of Christmas is that we first make believe a thing is so, and lo, it presently turns out to be so.
The excellence of a gift lies in its appropriateness rather than in its value.
The last Christmas movie I really liked was ‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’ probably. It’s sort of a schmaltzy movie, but it’s not without its dark moments. It still gets to me every year.
Christmas, my child, is love in action. Every time we love, every time we give, it’s Christmas.
I don’t care why they love me, as long as they love me. I think people respect me because they feel like – I’m kind of like Christmas. I come back every year. You can’t get rid of me. I just keep coming back.
One Christmas build-up tradition, however, has totally bypassed me – that of going up to town and ‘doing a show.’
That’s the true spirit of Christmas; people being helped by people other than me.
One of the best Christmas presents I ever got was the globe that I now keep right beside my desk.
I love Christmas. I really do love Christmas. I love being with my family and I love snow. I love the music and the lights and all of it.
It’s a rare film that has staying power. ‘A Christmas Story’ is not just a funny movie but something that connects with people.
One of my favorite times of year is around Christmas when my entire family gets together and we make tamales together. It’s a full two-day event, and we create an assembly line. It’s awesome because everyone has his or her own part in making the dish. It’s so much fun.
You know, I started my career in politics in 1967. I’m not new to this. I did not just fall off the Christmas tree. I understand the world is complex. I know that there are people out there who want to hurt other people.
There’s something about a Christmas sweater that will always make me laugh.
What I love about Christmas music is it stays around every year and comes back.
Brits and Americans have hundreds of different phrases for the same thing. Luckily, it’s usually a source of amusement rather than frustration. A flashlight by any other name is still a torch. My personal favourite is ‘fairy lights,’ which we boringly refer to as ‘Christmas lights.’
It kills me when people talk about California hedonism. Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.
I became hugely overweight and then hated myself because it was a form of self-abuse, something over which I had no control. I think the thing compulsive over-eaters want to achieve is that stuffed-full Christmas afternoon feeling.
Mail your packages early so the post office can lose them in time for Christmas.
Christmas makes everything twice as sad.
I love singing our Christmas songs every chance we get. It’s really cute.
The worst gift I have ever gotten on Christmas is going to see Tim Allen in ‘The Santa Clause.’
What makes ‘A Christmas Story’ universal, whether you celebrate Christmas or not, is that you recognize that family… It’s ultimately about a family being glued together for the holiday season.
For me, the two weeks between Christmas and Twelfth Night have come to be reserved for desultory reading. The pressure of the holiday is over, the weather outside is frightful, there are lots of leftovers to munch on, vacation hours are being used up.
The Christmas genre is a field that’s been well-ploughed.
Fans talk to me about how ‘Country Christmas’ has become a holiday tradition for them and that they all watch to start their holiday season. To be a part of people’s holiday traditions is a real joy.
Dickens was a part of how the whole celebration of Christmas as we know it today emerged during the 19th century.
All families had their special Christmas food. Ours was called Dutch Bread, made from a dough halfway between bread and cake, stuffed with citron and every sort of nut from the farm – hazel, black walnut, hickory, butternut.
It’s silly talking about how many years we will have to spend in the jungles of Vietnam when we could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home by Christmas.
At school, I’d be the dude singing to the girls, always up in the auditorium, in the lunch room singing Christmas carols, in the halls between class. I was always singing, and same thing with my grandfather. The apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree; you know how that goes.
When I first started shooting ‘Sharpe,’ back in the early 1990s, I’d kiss my two elder daughters goodbye at the end of August – Evie wasn’t even born then – and I wouldn’t see them again until Christmas. That was tough. They were hard times.
In 1988, Christmas, that was my last performance because I moved to Hawaii to raise my son.
Christmas is the season I use to clock failure in life. It stops time, as it were, on the year – where you are in it, where you are in your travail unto the grave.
God is in the details.
Making your Christmas cake in September is perfect, as too fresh a cake crumbles when cut.
The crown of lamb has always been a quintessential Christmas dish, and growing up in India, we would read about lamb when learning about the holiday.
Making a Christmas album is looked upon by some people as the thing you do when you are heading towards retirement.
There’s been a concerted effort to steal Christmas.
When I was 12, all I wanted for Christmas was a trampoline or a four-wheeler. I ended up getting both presents for Christmas.
My mother was a not-too-devoted atheist. She went to Episcopal church on Christmas Eve every year, and that was mostly it.
A typical Christmas is me shucking oysters. I love them and I always get them in at Christmas.
Every Christmas, all around Ghana, there are tons of these parties and they are full of everything that exists in human life in Ghana and worldwide.
To understand this Christmas record, you have to understand our ministry.
I’ve been giving back since I was a teen, handing out turkeys at Thanksgiving and handing out toys at toys drives for Christmas. It’s very important to give back as a youth. It’s as simple as helping an old lady across the street or giving up your seat on the bus for someone who is pregnant.
Christmas is taken very seriously in this household. I believe in Father Christmas, and there’s no way I’d do anything to undermine that belief.
Mama, you know, poor baby, she’d had her family all finished: four daughters and a couple of sons, and suddenly, I arrived in her midlife on Christmas Eve 1922.
Being a writer in Iceland, you get rewarded all the time: People really do read our books, and they have opinions; they love them, or they hate them. At the average Christmas party, people push politics and the Kardashians aside and discuss literature.
May I share with you my earliest memory of a political row? It was with my mother, about the Queen – classic Freudian stuff, shrinks would say. I was eight, and refusing to watch the Queen’s Christmas Day broadcast.
Accounts of eating Christmas sweet potatoes baked in ashes and jackrabbit stewed with white flour dumplings are testaments to pioneer resilience and pleasure – and they help inspire my own best scratch cooking.
Neither my mom nor my dad ever bought me any comic books. Certainly not for Christmas. I suspect that doing so would have violated the Parents’ Code.
I’ve always loved Christmas and that’s not really gone away from me from being a child to now. It’s always a magical time and I’m unashamed in my love for Christmas.
I used to know Jennifer Love Hewitt. We lived in the same apartment building when I was about… jeez, I guess it was when I was doing ‘Christmas Vacation’, so I was about 13 or 14.
Christmas is a season not only of rejoicing but of reflection.
I played guitar from the age of four or five. Every year there would be a slightly larger triangular box under the Christmas tree, until finally I got one that was big enough to make a proper sound.
I’m not a fan of musicals at all, but I do think ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’ is a very good. I always thought ‘Walk the Line’ was very good, too. I was in ‘Nowhere Boy.’ I played Paul McCartney. That was kind of musical – we did songs in that.
I love all the gift guides that the magazines put out, whether it’s ‘InStyle’ doing Mother’s Day gifts or color guides, or the ‘O’ magazine Christmas guide.
Every Christmas, all I ever wanted was Playskool instruments. It was my entire life. And then by the time I was 6 or 7 years old, it became, ‘Now I’m going to force my entire family to watch me perform all these rock songs.’
Christmas means a great deal to me. I was reared in a family that celebrated Christmas to some extent, but I married into a family that celebrated Christmas in a big way. And my wife always made a big thing of Christmas for the children. We have five children, and we had a terrific time at Christmas.
Every July, I look forward to taping a Christmas show – in July in Nashville. In 98-degree weather. I love it.
When I was in seventh grade, I asked my parents for a mobile recording system for Christmas, and I got it. I didn’t come out of my room for years after that. I’d get invited to the movies and I’d say, ‘I’m gonna finish a couple of demos.’
You can’t allow the forces of political correction to shut you up. I mean, why are people afraid to say, ‘Merry Christmas?’ Give me a break. If people don’t like it, yeah, they can go do something else.
Nature was developed to resist the onslaughts of capitalism, but it’s really not a very good defense – rather like resisting a steamroller with a Christmas tree ornament.
Christmas to a child is the first terrible proof that to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.
Having a birthday cake squashed into your face by young kids? Delicious. I always don a Santa suit at Christmas. Remaining childish is a tremendous state of innocence.
My worst Christmas ever was in 1987 when Santa brought me and my sister a dose of chicken-pox. And my worst present ever was a Dirt Devil vacuum cleaner! I don’t like to sound ungrateful, but I do find vacuuming difficult to get excited about.
My daughter is 15. None of her friends know who the hell Chris Rea is, but they know that song – as soon as it comes on, they start singing it. I’ve played with everyone from Status Quo to Talk Talk, but nothing impresses them as much as the fact that I play on ‘Driving Home for Christmas.’
I’m sure most of us remember being a kid and you have all of this endless time where two weeks before Christmas feels like ten years. I used to go to bed to try and go to sleep to try and make it go faster.
I tend to think of Pluto and its moons as presents sitting under a Christmas tree. They’re wrapped, and from Earth all we can do is look at the boxes to see whether they’re light or heavy, to see if something maybe jiggles a bit inside. We’re seeing intriguing things, but we really don’t know what’s in there.
It’s a sad commentary on our time – to use a phrase much favored by my late father – that people increasingly celebrate Christmas Day by going to the movies.
I spent pretty much all my wages from ‘No Country For Old Men’ on a pair of cowboy boots. They’re ridiculous. It’s like wearing two Christmas trees on my legs.
Every product you have ever loved was a compromise from the ideal vision of its creators to the realities of shipping on time, on budget, and on price point. Anyone who has ever manufactured a physical product that had to be on the shelves for Christmas shopping knows how painful these choices can be.
We’re raising our girls to understand the real meaning of Christmas, and to know that it’s most important to have Christmas in your heart. We go to our local mall and donate toys, and we say prayers for all the people in the world who might not be as lucky as we are.
I had eight brothers and sisters. Every Christmas my younger brother Bobby would wake up extra early and open everybody’s presents – everybody’s – so by the time the rest of us got up, all the gifts were shredded, ribbons off, torn open and thrown aside.
Well, traditionally, my husband and I go back to our farm in Virginia but we do Christmas every day. We truly do. For us, it’s about giving. We are of the Christian faith we believe that if people can see God in us, then we’re actually doing our job.
I love the atmosphere at the mall – everything about Christmas. I don’t think anything specific gets me in the holiday spirit except for the holidays themselves.
I write songs all the time. Sometimes they’re just weird songs I sing while changing a baby, or songs about annoying things that I sing to myself, or to friends while sitting at a bar, or about Christmas or New York.
There is no better time than now, this very Christmas season, for all of us to rededicate ourselves to the principles taught by Jesus the Christ. It is the time to love the Lord, our God, with all our heart – and our neighbors as ourselves.
My grade 3 teacher put on a kids’ Christmas concert, and I played the kazoo, so my mother bought me a trumpet. I took lessons for eight years, was in the Kitsilano Boys Band, and I played in the Vancouver Junior Symphony for two years.
I quickly discovered that trying to go play golf while living in Manhattan was about as easy as trying to grab a taxi while standing out in front of Saks Fifth Avenue in the freezing rain on the last shopping day before Christmas.
‘I am a bad mother.’ Every Christmas, this is what I think because the holiday season fills me with such anxiety. I’m sure that other mothers are happily baking cookies, decorating trees, and finding perfect gifts for everyone.
The only reason I even learned Japanese was to figure out what my parents were getting me for Christmas.
On Christmas morning, before we could open our Christmas presents, we would go to this stranger’s home and bring them presents. I remember helping clean the house up and putting up a tree. My father believed that you have a responsibility to look after everyone else.
It can’t be overstated how wonderful it is not to have to audition any more. Any actor will tell you, it’s like Christmas.
I associate the truest spirit of Christmas with certain years when I had to spend it at my parents’ house as an adult who had, presumably, escaped.
Christmas is joy, religious joy, an inner joy of light and peace.
The supernatural birth of Christ, his miracles, his resurrection and ascension, remain eternal truths, whatever doubts may be cast on their reality as historical facts.
For me growing up, Christmas time was always the most fantastic, exciting time of year, and you’d stay up until three in the morning. You’d hear the parents wrapping in the other room but you knew that also, maybe, they were in collusion with Santa Claus.
In our racist, sexist society, Christmas is the 8 hours when we stop killing each other and gratutious over eating is encouraged so that the starving and other people in the world can die!
For it is in giving that we receive.
I just travel all the time. And I was just looking at the schedules now and starting the first week of October I will be every weekend with somebody at tournaments through Christmas. So it gets very difficult to just go away and not do that.
I was never funny. I’d be funny once a year at Christmas. I’d do impressions of how people talked and danced, but that stopped when I was about 11.
I love Christmas. I’m really sentimental about it. My parents made it awesome for us, and we were allowed to be kids for a long time.
I would like to spend Christmas in different countries all over the world. I love seeing how different cultures celebrate the holidays in their own unique ways.
Christmas is my favorite time of the year.
It’s very difficult in England because the season is very long and hard compared to other places. There’s not a lot of recovery time at all, not even a break at Christmas. You just have to do your best and get on with it.
Christmas is a season which almost all Christians observe in one way or another. Some keep it as a religious season. Some keep it as a holiday. But all over the world, wherever there are Christians, in one way or another Christmas is kept.
Why not collect and clean chicken wishbones in the run-up to Christmas, spray them silver and use each to pinch together a white hem-stitch napkin?
I’m going to take the kids away over Christmas but I don’t, I’ve written 14 musicals now, I don’t want to rush into doing something just for the sake of doing it. I want to do it when I find a story.
I’ve been in Chicago for every Christmas of my life.
At Christmas play and make good cheer, for Christmas comes but once a year.
Christmas is over and Business is Business.
Growing up in Northern California, I’ve only seen snow at Christmas maybe twice in my life! I was always jealous of my cousins on the East Coast with their white Christmases.
There is no better time than now, this very Christmas season, for all of us to rededicate ourselves to the principles taught by Jesus the Christ. It is the time to love the Lord, our God, with all our heart – and our neighbors as ourselves.
Christmas is a season not only of rejoicing but of reflection.
Most Americans acquire dogs impulsively and for dubious reasons: as a Christmas gift for the kids. Because they saw one in a movie. To match the new living-room furniture. Because they moved to the suburbs and see a dog as part of the package.
Christmas is the day that holds all time together.
My parents were over the moon when I had some success with Christmas songs because that was the time of the year that meant so much to them. They were able to see their loved ones, and it was great to hear their son’s voice on the radio while they visited.
I’m Jewish, so I don’t really do Christmas gifts, and Hanukkah is not as big a deal as gifts are concerned, so I never actually give gifts.
I’m like everybody: I gain the Christmas 10 or so, and then I try to exercise more and dial it back.
We never really had any kind of a Christmas. This is one part where my memory fails me completely.
Christmas really is about all the cliches: health, happiness and love. A future with my family is the important thing… to stay alive for them.
One of the secrets of ‘A Christmas Story’ is that it’s a relatable story. They feel like our family.
I grew up poor, but I didn’t really know it because of amazing places like the Salvation Army where we got a lot of our Christmas presents from.
That is what Christmas should be about, I think – togetherness and playfulness. It’s like a game.
For many of us, Christmas lunch is the most special meal of the year – and I certainly want nothing but the very best for this celebration.
My early business ventures included growing Christmas trees and breeding birds.
When I was a kid and Christmas was coming up, my dad would ask me what I wanted, and I always said a motorbike. I kept asking for one, and he said it was too dangerous and bought me a go-kart instead.
Indeed, the Royal Family still retain the German custom – introduced by Prince Albert – of opening their presents on Christmas Eve rather than Christmas morning.
Opening presents at midnight on Christmas Eve – midnight! As soon as it turns to Christmas Day, we’re opening those gifts.
At every Christmas, I fail to remember the daughters’ shoe sizes, and they are not growing, but grown. After ostensible hard thought about who needs what, I have failed to give good gifts; I have failed to receive good gifts.
I think it’s important not to grow up too fast. I’m 26 now, and I still can’t wait for Christmas Day. The inner seven-year-old isn’t buried too deeply in me.
Fashion Week is like Christmas.
When you travel on Christmas, for you as the traveler – whether you’re in 1A or 39D – there is a mental state that you have to put yourself in: that you’re traveling at the busiest time of the year, and you’re going to take whatever comes your way.
Unless we make Christmas an occasion to share our blessings, all the snow in Alaska won’t make it ‘white’.
The Christmas tree goes up on December 1. I love it.
I have already done two Christmas films: ‘Elf’ and ‘Four Christmases.’ I guess I really am a sucker for Christmas. Both movies are really about the importance of family. I come from a brood of five kids, and it’s the one time of year we can all get together. It’s hands-down my favorite holiday.
The league has been good to all of us in terms of what we get out of all these TV contracts and everything, so it would be a little disingenuous to complain too much. But if I had my way, we’d take a five-day break at Christmas. I mean it.
Christmas is a time for slipping into familiar patterns.
For Christmas I do gift bags for my friends and the cast, and I put ‘treat yo self’ key chains in there. And people send me pictures of ‘treat yo self’ all the time.
I cut ‘Diamond in My Crown’ in my home in Georgia, because I wanted to use an old 1848 pump organ that my mother-in-law had gotten for Emory for Christmas one year. His mother would be proud to know that pump organ was made use of.
During the holiday season, Christmas specifically, it can be hard to be away from family and friends.
In 1934, the American Jewish charities offered to find homes for 300 German refugee children. We were on the SS Washington, bound for New York, Christmas 1934.
‘A Christmas Story’ has always meant a lot to me personally.
I have always wanted to do a Christmas album and covers.
Sometime in the early Seventies, gender-free toys were briefly a popular idea. So at Christmas on the California beach in 1972, we downplayed the dolls with frilly dresses and loaded up Santa’s sack with toy trucks and earth movers for our three daughters.
I love the smell of a real Christmas tree – also, my mum’s Christmas pudding with brandy sauce.
For a long time all I wanted for Christmas were books about outdoor survival. I was convinced that the woods were calling me. I camped a lot, I took classes. At 18, I told myself if I don’t live in the woods by myself by the time I’m 25, I have failed.
I can’t tell you how scary it can be walking onto a movie and suddenly joining this family, it’s like going to somebody else’s Christmas dinner, everyone knows everyone, and you’re there and you’re not quite sure what you’re supposed to be doing.
Christmas albums are not something you do frequently.
My favorite holiday memory was sitting at home all day in my pajamas during winter break for school watching a bunch of old Christmas movies like ‘Jack Frost’ and ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ with my siblings and parents.
I like to think I’m like the guy who goes to the office Christmas party Friday night, insults some people, but still has his job Monday morning.
I sang ‘Your Song’ by Elton John, and Silva Screen Records were watching. They got in touch with my agent then had the idea of the Christmas album.
Moving between the legs of tables and of chairs, rising or falling, grasping at kisses and toys, advancing boldly, sudden to take alarm, retreating to the corner of arm and knee, eager to be reassured, taking pleasure in the fragrant brilliance of the Christmas tree.
Christmas renews our youth by stirring our wonder. The capacity for wonder has been called our most pregnant human faculty, for in it are born our art, our science, our religion.
My family background is Mexican, and I was born in Chicago. It’s pretty much family tradition every time we get together for Christmas and major holidays to sing. Our family time is centered around the food and a little bit of performing for one another.
Christmas is, of course, the time to be home – in heart as well as body.
The sharpest memory of our old-fashioned Christmas eve is my mother’s hand making sure I was settled in bed.
I think Christmas, for me, has always been about family, as cliche as that sounds.
Christmas is a time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell the government what they want – and their kids pay for it.
Our children await Christmas presents like politicians getting in election returns: there’s the Uncle Fred precinct and the Aunt Ruth district still to come in.
My parents got me a $25 Kent steel-string acoustic guitar when I was around 12. The following Christmas, my parents bought me a Conora electric guitar. It looked almost like a Gretsch. It cost $59, and my mom still has it.
My brothers and sisters, true love is a reflection of the Savior’s love. In December of each year we call it the Christmas spirit. You can hear it. You can see it. You can feel it.
For the millions of Americans, like my family, who believe that there is a creator God who can be known personally, Christmas is a celebration of Jesus’ offer of love and forgiveness for all people.
The theme of ‘A Christmas Story’ is that you can count on Christmas – that everybody has a Christmas story. Everybody has that time in the holiday season that they remember.
Santa is our culture’s only mythic figure truly believed in by a large percentage of the population. It’s a fact that most of the true believers are under eight years old, and that’s a pity.
Untangling Christmas lights is the true tragedy of ‘Stranger Things.’
We always watch ‘The Polar Express.’ I love that movie; that’s a very, very nice Christmas tradition that we have.
Britain’s passion for Christmas and huge white weddings dates from Victorian times – both were low-key celebrations before Victoria and her PR machine.
After Pride, Christmas is a drag queen’s next best holiday. It’s pretty gay, full of tinsel and glitter and finery and campness.
I got this Christmas gift with the entire Beatles catalog. I had fun trying to duplicate what I was hearing on these records, only using the instruments I had at hand – an acoustic guitar, and that’s all. It was endlessly amusing to me to try to imitate John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s harmonies using the guitar.
‘A Christmas Story’ is my favorite Christmas movie.
I’ve also just finished filming the role of Robert Brown in ‘Just William,’ which is due to transmit on BBC One at Christmas.
Online, there’s no time. It’s always Christmas.
I had a year-round Christmas tree with nothing but colored vinyl 45s hanging on it, like, old Elvis records and stuff.
Tiny quails may not seem as impressive as a mammoth turkey, but there is something refreshing about a spread of individual birds on the Christmas table.
Christmas is a rare occasion when we are reminded that we have obligations to people we did not choose to be related to, and that love is not just a spontaneous feeling but something we sometimes really have to work at, with people we may not even much like.
Leftists wage the war on Christmas using their traditional methods – government fiat and the court system. They never win voting, and they certainly don’t win in the free market, so they bravely fight their battles through big government.
For it is in giving that we receive.
For me, the spirit of Christmas means being happy and giving freely. It’s a tradition for all the kids in the family to help mom decorate the tree. Christmas is all about family, eating, drinking and making merry.
When I was 11, I made truffle risotto for my family for Christmas dinner.
No matter where I am in the world, I will always be back home for Christmas.
Me and my girlfriend don’t have any family in Ipswich, so we were thinking of what we could do to fill our time on Christmas Day. We thought about feeding the homeless and we phoned up the church that we eventually went to and asked if we could help.
What I don’t like about office Christmas parties is looking for a job the next day.
Almost any American can connect on some level to a family background of having come across some ocean. They say, ‘My great-grandparents came from wherever… this is why we have this last name, why we do this thing at Christmas.’ All the details get watered down but don’t quite disappear.
When I was five years old, my parents gave me a drum set for Christmas. My mom played the piano, and Dad played the saxophone badly. But that Christmas morning, I remember we all played together, and I thought it was the greatest day ever.
Halloween starts earlier and earlier, just like Christmas.
Country ham is baked whole, usually with a glaze, sometimes studded with cloves, and served as the centerpiece of Christmas and Easter feasts.
My son was 8 or 9, and he really wanted a gun. It was Christmas, and I said to my husband, ‘It’s time for a gun.’
I was supposed to be working on ‘The Weekenders,’ but I was blocked. I got this crazy idea that I would make Christmas stockings out of blankets.
I train every day but Christmas. I’m not the guy who gets a contract signed and then trains for a fight. I’m at practice every single day, whether I’ve got a match or not.
I think the people who are making Christmas-themed movies today feel that people are more cynical about Christmas. There’s more of an edge.
With a track like ‘White Christmas,’ everybody has done that song in every format you can imagine, so I just looked at the chords at that particular song and what chords would make it work. That’s kind of quite a sad song, and I had this idea of someone singing it in the subway, someone who is homeless, old and sad.
The joy of Christmas causes hundreds of radio stations around the country to play Christmas music all day, and people will exchange millions of gifts to remember the first gift of Christmas, the infant Jesus.
I really like the European carols, and I like that captivating sound that they have that isn’t usually in Christmas songs.
In Denmark, the annual Christmas party is probably the most important cultural institution in the country.
I kind of have a uniform for office parties and Christmas parties. What I do is put on a basic tuxedo shirt with a solid navy or black tie, a tweed jacket, a red pocket square, and some sort of fancy shoe or velvet slipper.
Grief is a room without doors – but somehow, with its tinsel and cliches, Christmas finds a way in.
Seeing lights being put up along the street and these colored lanterns called parols being put up at people’s houses makes Christmas in Philippines magical.
T’was the night before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
My father Bill had a problem with Christmas. Although he appears in old photographs to possess a whippy, muscular frame, he was actually a frail man and usually managed to cause some kind of drama just before the festivities began.
I love Christmas. Frosty the Snowman, peace on Earth and mangers, Salvation Army bell ringers and reindeer, the movie ‘Meet Me in St. Louis,’ office parties and cookies.
No matter what, I always make it home for Christmas. I love to go to my Tennessee Mountain Home and invite all of my nieces and nephews and their spouses and kids and do what we all like to do – eat, laugh, trade presents and just enjoy each other… and sometimes I even dress up like Santa Claus!
The most classic French dessert around the holidays is the Christmas log, with butter cream. Two flavors. Chocolate and coconut. My first job in the kitchen when I was a boy was to make these Christmas logs.
I once wanted to become an atheist, but I gave up – they have no holidays.
I love Christmas. I love the music… I love everything about Christmas. I’m a big fan.
I’ve been in elementary education for years and my belief is that Christmas pageants in schools are little more than conditioning kids for the Christian religion.
November is auspicious in so many parts of the country: the rice harvest is already in, the weather starts to cool, and the festive glow which precedes Christmas has began to brighten the landscape.
I love Christmas movies.
I was in Atlanta for nine years and we never got to play on Christmas Day.
My mom always makes the whole family pile into the car and drive around to look at the Christmas lights. My brother and I never want to do it, but my mom just loves it!
I had always sung in choirs. Even when it was something to be laughed at or made fun of, you know, in school. And I was always the kid who was picked at the Christmas concert to sing the solo, you know, while the other kids snickered in the front few rows.
Let’s be naughty and save Santa the trip.
I was born with an extremely negative attitude. I was the kid who wouldn’t smile in Christmas photos, was a poor sport, and hated a lot of things. I eventually grew out of my negativity when I matured.
Religious symbols should be visible in public space, in a dignified and non-provocative manner. Christmas trees here, Jewish menorahs there and, further along, a minaret – these symbols represent human life in all its diversity.
I love Christmas, not just because of the presents but because of all the decorations and lights and the warmth of the season.
My parents are both from Belfast. I have an Irish passport and a British passport, and I go back every summer and every Christmas, and sometimes I pop over during the year to say hi, and, of course, celebrate St. Patrick’s Day.
I think ‘Elf’ is funny, with Will Ferrell. That’s a great Christmas movie.
Ranking among the greatest Christmas movie classics, ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ tells a beautiful story about the priceless value of relationships.
Growing up, my earliest memories are listening to Sinatra Christmas albums.
Christmas is not a time nor a season, but a state of mind. To cherish peace and goodwill, to be plenteous in mercy, is to have the real spirit of Christmas.
Sometimes I wonder: What are the children thinking? And sometimes I wonder why the hell I’m not buying a tree like the other neighbors. After all, there is no mention in Christianity of Christmas trees, and even if there were – is there any good reason why I shouldn’t be buying some red stockings?
I was always the kid who wanted Christmas to not come, because I realized at a pretty early age that no matter what you got, there’s always a little bit of a letdown. It’s like, ‘Oh, gee, I wanted two ponies, not one.’
Christmas time! That man must be a misanthrope indeed, in whose breast something like a jovial feeling is not roused – in whose mind some pleasant associations are not awakened – by the recurrence of Christmas.
Roast potatoes – I can’t say no. At Christmas, I reach over for the fifth or sixth one, and I think I could keep going until I explode.
I always go to my mom’s house for Christmas.
There’s a little vanity chair that Charlie gave me the first Christmas we knew each other. I’ll not be parting with that, nor our bed – the four-poster – I’ll be needing that to die in.
When I first came out, holidays were hard. I reached a point where I didn’t go home anymore. I constructed my own, kind of like, family group around Christmas.
I do get approached every day by people who say, ‘Why don’t you make more movies?’ I don’t really miss it when I get to go and watch my daughter in the Christmas pageant.
Is it possible Hanukkah doesn’t inspire folksy songs? Plot lines may be a part. The Christmas story has a lot of material to work with. There’s Jesus and his birth, the wise men, their gifts and tons of frankincense.
The sight of people sleeping on the streets hits us hardest around Christmas and New Year. We see them camped out alone on the freezing concrete, and we think, with a rush of guilt, about heading home to our families and our soft beds.
Faith is salted and peppered through everything at Christmas. And I love at least one night by the Christmas tree to sing and feel the quiet holiness of that time that’s set apart to celebrate love, friendship, and God’s gift of the Christ child.
My mother-in-law has come round to our house at Christmas seven years running. This year we’re having a change. We’re going to let her in.
Halloween isn’t the only time for ghosts and ghost stories. In Victorian Britain, spooky winter’s tales were part of the Christmas season, often told after dinner, over port or coffee.
Fantastic! Right in the middle of that long stretch between Christmas and Spring Break, your coats are getting dirty, everything’s dark, dingy – what a great time for a movie!
Part of me wants to be married and have everybody around the table for Christmas. But when you’re married, your life becomes integrated solely with that person. There are too many characters running around inside me. Maybe they should all be married to somebody different.
Yeah, I started when I was 6 years old. My brother and sister would get all of these presents at Christmas time from the cast and crew of their show and I was jealous. So I decided that I had to become an actor.
