I love making savory stratas for Christmas morning. I get excited about it. It's a polenta strata with homemade bread, with a billion eggs and Parmesan cheese. I'll drizzle truffle oil over the whole thing, which will just destroy people. It's amazing.

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.

In Denmark, the annual Christmas party is probably the most important cultural institution in the country.

A friend gave me a CD of the 'Pathetique' Symphony as a Christmas present. I went home, and I put on the CD expecting to listen to Tchaikovsky. But it started 'ta ta ta taaa.' It was too long for me. I didn't understand it at first, but then I fell in love, in love, in love.

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.

I love Christmas, not just because of the presents but because of all the decorations and lights and the warmth of the season.

I'm in an age bracket now where I can play the father of an adult daughter whose going through her life issues, and she'll come to me for advice while I'm wearing my Christmas sweater and swirling a cup of hot cocoa.

Christmas cookies can't help but be retro - they are memory first, sugar-flour-egg-redhot-gumdrop-sparkle reality second.

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.

Mom still has a huge, beautifully decorated Christmas tree. The whole family comes together after midnight mass and has the traditional plum cake and wine. We spend the night at mom's home, and in the morning we wake up and open the presents. In the afternoon, we sit down to have a traditional Christmas lunch.

Throughout my teenage years, I read 'A Christmas Carol' by Charles Dickens every December. It was a story that never failed to excite me, for as well as being a Dickens enthusiast, I have always loved ghost stories.

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.

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.

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

Spanish Explorers celebrated Christmas in 1539 in the area we now know as the State of Florida.

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.

So many Christmas films either are twee, or try and go super edgy, then stick on something Christmassy at the end of the movie.

Every Christmas, I cook an elaborate Mexican dinner.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Fashion Week is like Christmas.

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.

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.

I was a postman one Christmas and I developed a morbid fear of dogs.

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.

I once bought my kids a set of batteries for Christmas with a note on it saying, toys not included.

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'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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I hate Christmas, really. I don't really give presents away or expect any.

I love all things Christmas.

It was, you know, probably 80 degrees out in L.A., and my dad took me outside and there was snow. At the time, I thought, 'Every kid doesn't have snow in their backyard on Christmas?'

I had written a book that dealt with really serious issues. Was anybody going to want to read a Christmas love story from me?

I love Christmas. Christmas is family time.

I loved 'White Christmas' for the music aspect. I was into musical theater.

Miramax seems to be showing the same faith in Roberto Benigni's 'Pinocchio' that the Republican Party showed in Trent Lott; the live-action version of Carlo Collodi's fairy tale about the wooden puppet whose only ambition was to be a real live boy was sneaked into theaters Christmas 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 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.

I made a Christmas album a couple of years ago and just put it out on my Web site. It kind of smacked of this flavor. All of the reviews said it was Western swing even when it was Christmas standards.

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 sharpest memory of our old-fashioned Christmas eve is my mother's hand making sure I was settled in bed.

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.

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.