Daily Inspiration

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.

I love spending time with my family and friends during the holidays, and my favorite holiday tradition would be the pozole that my mom makes almost every Christmas. It's the best!

Dickens was a part of how the whole celebration of Christmas as we know it today emerged during the 19th century.

Once you start a business, you have to grow it and grow with it - starting a business is not just for Christmas.

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.

I used to sleep in the T-shirt I wore during the day and whatever ratty old gym shorts I could find on the floor. But one year for Christmas, someone gave me a very chic, comfortable pair of pajamas from Brooks Brothers, and I realized the error of my ways.

Christmas movies, it's a hard thing to do. The danger is you just end up with a Hollywood star with a Santa beard. You risk it being fake and cheesy and not real.

I love presents, But since I've gotten older, I haven't really wanted anything. Christmas is about family.

My first real job, I sold Christmas trees when I was twelve for extra money. I did that until I was fifteen. Then I bagged groceries, and I worked at the first Borders ever in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

I loved the first Christmas I had in England.

I hate to say it, but Christmas as a kid was always a moneymaking venture for me. I played trumpet, and a friend of mine who played trombone and a guy who played tuba, every Christmas we'd go out for three or four days beforehand and play Christmas carols on our horns.

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.

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.

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.

On the morning, Daddy and I get up at six o'clock because Christmas trees must be bought in the dark. We walk to the other end of town, as the big harbour is just the right setting for buying a Christmas tree. We spend hours choosing, looking at every branch suspiciously. It's always cold.

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.

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.

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.

I have a good house for hosting, so we had the barbecues, and some of the guys over for Thanksgiving, even Christmas.

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.

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.

'A Christmas Carol' has been described as the most perfect of Dickens's works and as a quintessential heart-warming story, and it is certainly the most popular.

The Christmas market at the Barcelona Cathedral sells all kinds of things for your Nativity scene. It will also give you a good idea of Catalan culture.

If you're an English actor, and you're asked to do an episode - especially the Christmas episode - of 'Downton Abbey,' you can't turn it down. It's like, 'Of course!'

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.

It's funny, I was talking to somebody who writes for a cop show, and he was saying how they aren't allowed to acknowledge Christmas, Thanksgiving, Valentine's Day, just because it has to be able to play forever.

'White Christmas' is one of my favorite movies, so I've always just had a love for that kind of golden era musical.

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!

I'd rather do community service than sit and write a load of Christmas cards.

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.

Our family's special holiday tradition is going over to my grandparent's house on Christmas morning. My grandma cooks a big breakfast, and I love hearing her tell old funny stories.

Mummy weighed sweets and nuts so that everyone would get exactly the same amount. During the year, everything is measured roughly, but at Christmas, it has to be absolutely fair. That's why it's such a strenuous time.

My father used to always give me a basketball, a skate board, and a bike every Christmas. That's all I wanted every year.

There's a little Christmas in all of us, I guess. Even in me.

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.

One lived in the impression that nobody could ever compete with the 'Nutcracker' or 'A Christmas Carol.'

I've not cooked Christmas dinner since 1982.

The smell of pine needles, spruce and the smell of a Christmas tree - those to me, are the scents of the holidays.

I've played D&D for years. I'm a comic book guy. Comic-Con in San Diego is nerd Christmas for me.

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.

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 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.

'A Christmas Carol' is an extravagantly symbolic thing - as rich in symbols as Christmas pudding is rich in raisins.

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.

We don't consider the Wizard of Oz or Father Christmas to be too old. They're still magical characters, and the fact they've been around the block only adds to their magic.

My father died when I was really young, on Christmas Day.

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.

We even had a different word for Christmas in my language, Bengali: Baradin, which literally meant 'big day.'

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.

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.