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.’
It’s bad enough being conned into singing an anti-war message by John Lennon when you think you’re just wishing everyone a merry Christmas.
At Christmas time, I spent an extortionate amount of money on Buzz Lightyear toys, baby clothes, Disney cars and the like.
Most of us remember Nat King Cole as a vocalist. His warm, grainy baritone is still so closely identified with such familiar ballads as ‘Stardust’ and ‘The Christmas Song’ that it’s hard to imagine anyone else performing them.
I love ‘Call the Midwife’; it’s an absolute gem of a programme. Filming the Christmas special and then the second series felt like going back to a boarding school that you really love and is full of friends.
My mother cooked her last Christmas standing rib roast in 1987 and died a few weeks 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.
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.
When it comes to referring to Dickens’s life, performing plays with your nine children for friends and family during Christmas is Dickensian.
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.
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.
When I was 11, I made truffle risotto for my family for Christmas dinner.
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.
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.
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 love Christmas. Christmas is family time.
On Christmas morning, we always make breakfast, and everyone eats before we open any presents. I make muffins and homemade applesauce, which I don’t think anyone likes as much as I do… I just love the way it makes the house smell!
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 is a great time to recommit to each other and our communities.
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 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.
Spanish Explorers celebrated Christmas in 1539 in the area we now know as the State of Florida.
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.
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.
