My mother accidentally gave me food poisoning. She fed me baby carrots for a snack before Christmas dinner - but they had expired in June! I threw up for the next 24 hours.

The family is the focal point of our existence. And up until Jane and Lucy's death, there were always 16 of us together for Christmas.

Christmas in L.A. is weird. There's no snow. It's not even cold.

I've been in Chicago for every Christmas of my life.

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

From the time that I can remember, I worked to make money - either baby-sitting, or one year wrapping gifts at a department store at Christmas, so I could have my own money.

I do watch 'It's a Wonderful Life' with my children at Christmas, and I liked it long before it went into the public domain and became a cliche.

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.

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.

As a child, I saw my mother prepare for Christmas every year, and it never occurred to me that labor was involved. I thought it was my mother's joy and privilege to hang tinsel on the tree strand by strand, to make sure that every room in the house had a touch of Christmas, down to the Santa-themed rug and hand towels in the bathroom.

Christmas albums are not something you do frequently.

One Christmas build-up tradition, however, has totally bypassed me - that of going up to town and 'doing a show.'

It may be a cliche, but it's true - the build-up to Christmas is so much more pleasurable than the actual day itself.

When we made 'Life in a Day,' we asked people around the globe to record their lives on a single ordinary day. When we were cutting that film, we talked about what it might be like if we chose a day that already had significance to people. The result is 'Christmas in a Day.'

There are very few people who have done more than one Christmas album.

I was one of those goofy kids whose year narrowed down to focus on Christmas from about September on. I guess I was like Ralphie in 'A Christmas Story,' in that I would get swept up into the anticipation of the holiday, watching the lights go up, hearing the songs in the stores, getting special Christmas issues of comics and all that.

As much as I liked the build-up to Christmas, the week after always socked me with the blues.

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.

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 love what they do with 'Doctor Who,' where they have the series, and then they do a big Christmas movie special.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Christmas is a story that has both religious and pagan origins, and to ignore its power is to ignore the power of myth - those symbols and legends that help us to ground our lives.

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.

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.'

The Christmas genre is a field that's been well-ploughed.

I think it's kind of difficult to write a good Christmas song because you have a narrow framework of references that you have to work within, and at the same time you want to do something that's personally original and hopefully somewhat unique.

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 like animals. I like people who like animals. I hate people who love animals to the point they lose their sense of reason. I'm talking the 'my computer wallpaper is my dog,' 'I hang a Christmas stocking for my cat' crowd.

All punk rockers hate Christmas.

Country ham is baked whole, usually with a glaze, sometimes studded with cloves, and served as the centerpiece of Christmas and Easter feasts.

'El Gordo' is the name given to the oldest lottery jackpot in the world - and the richest. Held every year in Madrid on December 22, the Christmas Lottery culminates with the picking of the El Gordo number, the Fat One, which, for many, has become the true Christmas miracle in Spain.

The cheese board is my big treat at Christmas that I have to deny myself during the rest of year.

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!

Christmas is a time for slipping into familiar patterns.

First of all, I've been having a wonderful run of luck with cover albums, songs I didn't write. I had five pop cover albums and two Christmas albums, and they were all very successful.

As Michael Scheuer, who ran the C.I.A.'s bin Laden unit until 1999, has pointed out, if bin Laden believed in Christmas, the Iraq war would be his perfect present from Santa Claus. The 9/11 attacks and the subsequent war in Afghanistan severely damaged bin Laden's organization.

Saying that you spend Christmas alone is, to most middle-class Americans, akin to confessing a terminal illness.

I could be imagining it, but I believe myself to have exchanged sly, understanding nods with other people I see attending movies alone on Christmas Day.

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.

At the beginning of 'A Christmas Carol,' Scrooge embodies one of the central tenets of depression: that one has always been this way - and always will be.

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'd like to do a Christmas album. I've never done a Christmas album.

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.

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 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've got a quad copter on my Christmas list, as I suspect quite a few people do.