To experience and live out a harmony with the world, in a manner quite different from that of everyday life — this, we have said, is the meaning of "festival." But no more intense harmony with the world can be thought of than that of "Praise of God," the worship of the Creator of this world. Now, as I have often experienced, this statement is often received with a mixture of discomfort and various other feelings, but its truth cannot be denied. The most festive festival that can be celebrated is religious worship or "cult," and there is no festival that does not get its life from such worship or does not actually derive its origin from this. There is no worship "without the gods," whether it be mardi gras or a wedding.

Christmas is a time in which, of all times in the year, the memory of every remediable sorrow, wrong, and trouble in the world around us, should be active with us, not less than our own experiences, for all good.

We talk about Christmas traditionally as the season of good cheer, but I don't think that sort of Dickensian jollity really cuts the mustard in prison. I tend to take a slightly different slant; I describe it as the season of hope.

Christmas is not a time nor a season, but a state of mind. To cherish peace and goodwill, to be plenteous in mercy, is to have the real spirit of Christmas.

In the ancient days when gods played their own games, and had their own celebrations, tossing lightning bolts between mountaintops, hurling great boulders — Festivus came out of that. It's a holiday that celebrates being alive at a time when it was hard to be alive. There was no Christ yet, no Yahweh, no Buddha. There were great ruins and raw nature. But there was a kindling spark of hope among men. They celebrated that great thunderous storms hadn't enveloped them in the past year, that landslides hadn't destroyed them. They made wishes that their crops would grow in the fields, that they'd have food the next year and the wild animals wouldn't attack and eat them. There's something pure about Festivus, something primal, raw in the hearts of humans.

I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round, as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.

Ever since the Christmas of '53, I have felt that the yuletide is a special hell for those families who have suffered any loss or who must admit to any imperfection; the so-called spirit of giving can be as greedy as receiving — Christmas is our time to be aware of what we lack, of who's not home.

Let festivals be a time when we all come together as one, equal in our shared humanity.

People need to understand that while Christmas is a Christian holiday, the season belongs to everyone.

It was as Hester said, in regard to the unwanted jollity that brightened the faces of the people. Into this festal season of the year - as it already was, and continued to be during the greater part of two centuries - the Puritans compressed whatever mirth and public joy they deemed allowable to human infirmity; thereby so far dispelling the customary cloud, that, for the space of a single holiday, they appeared scarcely more grave than most other communities at a period of general affliction.

Christmas is the season for kindling the fire of hospitality in the hall, the genial flame of charity in the heart.

Christmas is a day of meaning and traditions, a special day spent in the warm circle of family and friends.

Christmas is doing a little something extra for someone.

I think there is something at Christmas that challenges us all to think about being generous to others. To reach out and maybe give people a little joy. Maybe that’s why I love doing Christmas movies. It’s a way of being generous with oneself and I like that.