Pastoral Resources

Christmas is the time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell government what they want and their kids pay for it.

On the whole, I prefer Christmas as an adult than I did as a child.

At Christmas, 'It's a Wonderful Life' makes me cry in exactly the same places every time, even though I know it's coming.

Now, the essence, the very spirit of Christmas is that we first make believe a thing is so, and lo, it presently turns out to be so.

I just travel all the time. And I was just looking at the schedules now and starting the first week of October I will be every weekend with somebody at tournaments through Christmas. So it gets very difficult to just go away and not do that.

There are some people who want to throw their arms round you simply because it is Christmas; there are other people who want to strangle you simply because it is Christmas.

A Christmas Carol is such a fool-proof story you can't louse it up.

I think the people who are making Christmas-themed movies today feel that people are more cynical about Christmas. There's more of an edge.

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

I wrapped my Christmas presents early this year, but I used the wrong paper. See, the paper I used said 'Happy Birthday' on it. I didn't want to waste it so I just wrote 'Jesus' on it.

I was talking to one of my aunties at Christmas and she said she didn't think it was ever in my nature to go against the grain, that I was always a good boy. I think she was right - I did always want to be good.

We never really had any kind of a Christmas. This is one part where my memory fails me completely.

Actually, my mother and Alfie came for three weeks' Christmas vacation and stayed for 21 years. I guess my mother never went back because she was lonely.

Please to put a nickel, please to put a dime. How petitions trickle in at Christmas time!

Godot is whatever it is in life that you are waiting for: 'I'm waiting to win the lottery. I'm waiting to fall in love'. For me, as a child, it was Christmas. At least that eventually came.

Well, because I have twin seven-year-old boys, I enjoy the gift giving stuff a great deal. We do both Hanukkah and Christmas, so it is a costly, though extremely pleasing proposition.

Christmas carols always brought tears to my eyes. I also cry at weddings. I should have cried at a couple of my own.

In the spring of 1994 I decided not to seek reelection to the Senate. I had made the decision 12 years earlier, Christmas Day of 1982, just after I had been first elected to a full term, that I would do the best I could for a limited time.

Christmas is, of course, the time to be home - in heart as well as body.

T'was the night before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.