Daily Inspiration

Christmas is a great time to recommit to each other and our communities.

The fact is, we need markers in life, whether we subscribe to a religion or not. And the major holidays, such as Christmas, serve to remind us of the turning world.

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.

I started with the Target Company in 1993 when their Christmas theme that year was 'It's A Wonderful Life,' and they reunited the actors who played the Bailey kids. So we went all over and really had a blast getting the love from all of the fans and thought, 'Whoopty-doo, there's something going on here.'

All punk rockers hate Christmas.

It's easy to write a short story and frighten people for five pages, but to work at length, when you do it as in 'The Turn Of The Screw' or 'A Christmas Carol,' it's different; you have to build it and build it.

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

As I remember my grandfather and those Christmas mornings he gave for a little girl's pleasure, I know that often a big life starts with doing small things.

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.

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.

Before Christmas, I host a party for our kids and all their friends. We love to make a mess while decorating gingerbread houses.

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.

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.

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.

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.

After church on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, my family would go chop down our Christmas tree. Once it was home and placed in its stand, Mom and I would painstakingly decorate our tree. It took hours to place the tinsel, string the lights, find the perfect spot for my favorite macaroni and felt ornaments from kindergarten.

'Bond' was like Christmas: can't wait for it to come around. Being in the films brought me to a global audience, and I have had the opportunity to meet incredible people.

As we see thousands of public and private Christmas trees and nativity displays around the country, they remind us again of the powerful American value built into our Constitution: our freedom of religion.

The fact is, we need markers in life, whether we subscribe to a religion or not. And the major holidays, such as Christmas, serve to remind us of the turning world.

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.

'Use Somebody' I posted - it was the end of 2009, around Christmas. That was my first video.

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.

We used to indulge hopelessly as a family at Christmas. When the children were little, I dressed up as Father Christmas. They knew it was a gag, but they loved it. I remember stealing into their bedrooms at 1 A.M. and filling the stockings up at the end of the bed.

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.

I spent 250 to 300 days of every year on the road. But in the end, I felt something was missing. I needed to be anchored so I could concentrate, so in 2000, I established a new methodology - the one I use today. I spent the week in my office and travelled every weekend, even at Christmas.

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.

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.

My favorite part was when my grandfather and I would make a special trip to Firpo's Bakery for red and green Christmas cookies and fruitcake studded with the sweetest cherries I've ever tasted. Usually Firpo's was too expensive for our slim budget, but Christmas mornings they gave a discount to any children who came in.

At Christmas time, I spent an extortionate amount of money on Buzz Lightyear toys, baby clothes, Disney cars and the like.

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.

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.

My parents got me a sewing machine for Christmas during my senior year of high school. I made three pieces of clothing and had a fashion show at the end of the year, where we had to wear the clothes that we made. I took it to a whole new level; I made all my friends clothes.

What I found out on Christmas Day 1984, through biochemical evidence, was that telomeres could be lengthened by the enzyme we called telomerase, which keeps the telomeres from wearing down. After I found that out, I went home and put on Bruce Springsteen's 'Born in the USA,' which was just out, and I danced and danced and danced.

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.

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.

At the age of 12, my parents gave me a chemistry set for Christmas, and experimentation soon became a consuming passion in my life.

I love Christmas. Christmas is family time.

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.

Christmas is, for those who wish to follow the way of Jesus, an invitation to accept into our comfortable and safe lives those who come to us from far away, who seem ragged, marginal, in transition.

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.

I would work until I got stuck, and I would put it down and pick up something else. I might be able to take a 20-minute nap and get to work again. That way, I was able to work about 10 hours a day... It was important to me to work every day. I managed to work on Christmas day, just to be able to say I worked 365 days a year.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

When it comes to referring to Dickens's life, performing plays with your nine children for friends and family during Christmas is Dickensian.

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.