Merry Christmas Quotations

Christmas waves a magic wand over this world, and behold, everything is softer and more beautiful.

~Norman Vincent Peale

Christmas is a time when you get homesick - even when you"re home.

~Carol Nelson

He who has not Christmas in his heart will never find it under a tree.

~Roy L. Smith

Christmas, children, is not a date.  It is a state of mind.

~Mary Ellen Chase

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.

~Charles Dickens

Christmas is the gentlest, loveliest festival of the revolving year - and yet, for all that, when it speaks, its voice has strong authority.

~W.J. Cameron

The best of all gifts around any Christmas tree:  the presence of a happy family all wrapped up in each other.

~Burton Hillis

Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days; that can recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth; that can transport the sailor and the traveler, thousands of miles away, back to his own fire-side and his quiet home!

~Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, 1836

There has been only one Christmas - the rest are anniversaries.  ~W.J. Cameron

A Christmas gambol oft could cheer the poor man"s heart through half the year.

~Walter Scott

Our hearts grow tender with childhood memories and love of kindred, and we are better throughout the year for having, in spirit, become a child again at Christmas-time.

~Laura Ingalls Wilder

May Peace be your gift at Christmas and your blessing all year through!

~Author Unknown

I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.

~Charles Dickens

Never worry about the size of your Christmas tree.  In the eyes of children, they are all 30 feet tall.

~Larry Wilde, The Merry Book of Christmas

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

~Washington Irving

Isn"t it funny that at Christmas something in you gets so lonely for - I don"t know what exactly, but it"s something that you don"t mind so much not having at other times.

~Kate L. Bosher

Instead of being a time of unusual behavior, Christmas is perhaps the only time in the year when people can obey their natural impulses and express their true sentiments without feeling self-conscious and, perhaps, foolish.  Christmas, in short, is about the only chance a man has to be himself.

~Francis C. Farley

It is Christmas in the heart that puts Christmas in the air.

~W.T. Ellis

For centuries men have kept an appointment with Christmas.  Christmas means fellowship, feasting, giving and receiving, a time of good cheer, home.

~W.J. Ronald Tucker

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

~Richard Lamm

Love is what"s in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening presents and listen.  ~Author unknown, attributed to a 7-year-old named Bobby

Christmas is forever, not for just one day,

for loving, sharing, giving, are not to put away

like bells and lights and tinsel, in some box upon a shelf.

The good you do for others is good you do yourself.

~Norman W. Brooks, "Let Every Day Be Christmas"

From a commercial point of view, if Christmas did not exist it would be necessary to invent it.  ~Katharine Whitehorn

In the old days, it was not called the Holiday Season; the Christians called it "Christmas" and went to church; the Jews called it "Hanukkah" and went to synagogue; the atheists went to parties and drank.  People passing each other on the street would say "Merry Christmas!" or "Happy Hanukkah!" or (to the atheists) "Look out for the wall!"

~Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping:  A Survivor"s Guide"

Remember

This December,

That love weighs more than gold!

~Josephine Dodge Daskam Bacon

I sometimes think we expect too much of Christmas Day.  We try to crowd into it the long arrears of kindliness and humanity of the whole year. As for me, I like to take my Christmas a little at a time, all through the year. And thus I drift along into the holidays - let them overtake me unexpectedly - waking up some find morning and suddenly saying to myself:  "Why, this is Christmas Day!"

~David Grayson

A Christmas candle is a lovely thing;

It makes no noise at all,

But softly gives itself away.

~Eva Logue

Perhaps the best Yuletide decoration is being wreathed in smiles.

~Author Unknown

Oh look, yet another Christmas TV special! How touching to have the meaning of Christmas brought to us by cola, fast food, and beer... Who"d have ever guessed that product consumption, popular entertainment, and spirituality would mix so harmoniously?

~Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes

When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time.  Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?

~G.K. Chesterton

For the spirit of Christmas fulfils the greatest hunger of mankind.

~Loring A. Schuler

I wish we could put up some of the Christmas spirit in jars and open a jar of it every month.  ~Harlan Miller

Sing hey!  Sing hey!

For Christmas Day;

Twine mistletoe and holly.

For a friendship glows

In winter snows,

And so let"s all be jolly!

~Author Unknown

To perceive Christmas through its wrapping becomes more difficult with every year.

~E.B. White, "The Distant Music of the Hounds," The Second Tree from the Corner, 1954

At Christmas play and make good cheer,

For Christmas comes but once a year

~Thomas Tusser

Oh, for the good old days when people would stop Christmas shopping when they ran out of money.

~Author Unknown

Christmas is for children.  But it is for grown-ups too.  Even if it is a headache, a chore, and nightmare, it is a period of necessary defrosting of chill and hide-bound hearts.

~Lenora Mattingly Weber

Roses are reddish

Violets are bluish

If it weren"t for Christmas

We"d all be Jewish.

~Benny Hill

I can understand people simply fleeing the mountainous effort Christmas has become... but there are always a few saving graces and finally they make up for all the bother and distress.  ~May Sarton

I do like Christmas on the whole.... In its clumsy way, it does approach Peace and Goodwill.  But it is clumsier every year.

~E.M. Forster

At Christmas

A man is at his finest towards the finish of the year;

He is almost what he should be when the Christmas season"s here;

Then he"s thinking more of others than he"s thought the months before,

And the laughter of his children is a joy worth toiling for.

He is less a selfish creature than at any other time;

When the Christmas spirit rules him he comes close to the sublime...

~Edgar Guest

Christmas is the season when you buy this year"s gifts with next year"s money.

~Author Unknown

The Church does not superstitiously observe days, merely as days, but as memorials of important facts. Christmas might be kept as well upon one day of the year as another; but there should be a stated day for commemorating the birth of our Savior, because there is danger that what may be done on any day, will be neglected.

~Samuel Johnson

The Christmas season has come to mean the period when the public plays Santa Claus to the merchants.

~John Andrew Holmes

It is the one season of the year when we can lay aside all gnawing worry, indulge in sentiment without censure, assume the carefree faith of childhood, and just plain "have fun."  Whether they call it Yuletide, Noel, Weinachten, or Christmas, people around the earth thirst for its refreshment as the desert traveler for the oasis.

~D.D. Monroe

If "ifs" and "buts" were candy and nuts, wouldn"t it be a Merry Christmas?

~Don Meredith

Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice.

~Unknown

I heard the bells on Christmas Day

Their old, familiar carols play,

And wild and sweet

The words repeat

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The message of Christmas is that the visible material world is bound to the invisible spiritual world.

~Author Unknown

I love the Christmas-tide, and yet,

I notice this, each year I live;

I always like the gifts I get,

But how I love the gifts I give!

~Carolyn Wells

"Tis (It"s) blessed to bestow, and yet,

Could we bestow the gifts we get,

And keep the ones we give away,

How happy were our Christmas day!

~Carolyn Wells

There"s nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child.  ~Erma Bombeck, I Lost Everything in the Post-Natal Depression

I hear that in many places something has happened to Christmas; that it is changing from a time of merriment and carefree gaiety to a holiday which is filled with tedium; that many people dread the day and the obligation to give Christmas presents is a nightmare to weary, bored souls; that the children of enlightened parents no longer believe in Santa Claus; that all in all, the effort to be happy and have pleasure makes many honest hearts grow dark with despair instead of beaming with good will and cheerfulness.

~Julia Peterkin, A Plantation Christmas, 1934

The earth has grown old with its burden of care,

But at Christmas it always is young.

~Phillips Brooks

Let Christmas not become a thing

Merely of merchant"s trafficking,

Of tinsel, bell and holly wreath

And surface pleasure, but beneath

The childish glamour, let us find

Nourishment for soul and mind.

Let us follow kinder ways

Through our teeming human maze,

And help the age of peace to come

From a Dreamer"s martyrdom.

~Madeline Morse

Nothing"s as mean as giving a little child something useful for Christmas.

~Kin Hubbard

Christmas begins about the first of December with an office party and ends when you finally realize what you spent, around April fifteenth of the next year.

~P.J. O"Rourke

Next to a circus there ain"t nothing that packs up and tears out faster than the Christmas spirit.

~Kin Hubbard

Wouldn"t life worth the living

Wouldn"t dreams becoming true

If we kept the Christmas spirit

All the whole year through?

~Author Unknown

And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice cold in the snow, stood puzzling and puzzling, how could it be so?  It came without ribbons.  It came without tags.  It came without packages, boxes or bags.  And he puzzled and puzzled "till his puzzler was sore.  Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn"t before.  What if Christmas, he thought, doesn"t come from a store. What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.

~Dr. Seuss

O Christmas Sun!  What holy task is thine!

To fold a world in the embrace of God!

~Guy Wetmore Carryl

Christmas - that magic blanket that wraps itself about us that something so intangible that it is like a fragrance.  It may weave a spell of nostalgia.  Christmas may be a day of feasting, or of prayer, but always it will be a day of remembrance - a day in which we think of everything we have ever loved.

~Augusta E. Rundel

People can"t concentrate properly on blowing other people to pieces if their minds are poisoned by thoughts suitable to the twenty-fifth of December.

~Ogden Nash

Oh! lovely voices of the sky

Which hymned the Savior"s birth,

Are ye not singing still on high,

Ye that sang, "Peace on earth"?

~Felicia Hemans

We hear the beating of wings over Bethlehem and a light that is not of the sun or of the stars shines in the midnight sky.  Let the beauty of the story take away all narrowness, all thought of formal creeds.  Let it be remembered as a story that has happened again and again, to men of many different races, that has been expressed through many religions, that has been called by many different names. Time and space and language lay no limitations upon human brotherhood.

~New York Times, 25 December 1937, quoted in Quotations for Special Occasions by Maud van Buren, 1938, published by The H.W. Wilson Company, New York