“If you desire to find the true spirit of Christmas and partake of the sweetness of it, let me make this suggestion to you. During the hurry of the festive occasion of this Christmas season, find time to turn your heart to God. Perhaps in the quiet hours, and in a quiet place, and on your knees—alone or with loved ones—give thanks for the good things that have come to you, and ask that His Spirit might dwell in you as you earnestly strive to serve Him and keep His commandments. He will take you by the hand and His promises will be kept.”

“I knew that I had been partially right in the storeroom above the bar on Christmas Day. Whoever I had become had to die.”

“Let the children have their night of fun and laughter. Let the gifts of Father Christmas delight their play. Let us grown-ups share to the full in their unstinted pleasures before we turn again to the stern task and the formidable years that lie before us, resolved that, by our sacrifice and daring, these same children shall not be robbed of their inheritance or denied their right to live in a free and decent world.” Winston Churchill Christmas Eve Message, 1941 as printed in “In the Dark Streets Shineth.”

“Look up.”

“The Supreme Court has ruled that they cannot have a nativity scene in Washington, D.C. This wasn’t for any religious reasons. They couldn’t find three wise men and a virgin.”

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

“How many observe Christ’s birthday! How few, His precepts!”

“One true king knew when to step aside and give up the reins of power—to remove his crown and relinquish his kingdom—all for the sake of glimpsing, just once in a lifetime, the face of a holy child.He was the Fourth to follow the Star.His gift was a secret.The rest of his journey is unknown.”

“The more death, the more birth. People are entering, others are exiting. The cry of a baby, the mourning of others. When others cry, the other are laughing and making merry. The world is mingled with sadness, joy, happiness, anger, wealth, poverty, etc.”

“He went to the church, and walked about the streets, and watched the people hurrying to and for, and patted the children on the head, and questioned beggars, and looked down into the kitchens of homes, and up to the windows, and found that everything could yield him pleasure. He had never dreamed of any walk, that anything, could give him so much happiness. (p. 119)”

“The Christmas presents once opened are Not So Much Fun as they were while we were in the process of examining, lifting, shaking, thinking about, and opening them. Three hundred sixty-five days later, we try again and find that the same thing has happened. Each time the goal is reached, it becomes Not So Much Fun, and we’re off to reach the next one, then the next one, then the next.That doesn’t mean that the goals we have don’t count. They do, mostly because they cause us to go through the process and it’s the process that makes us wise, happy, or whatever. If we do things in the wrong sort of way, it makes us miserable, angry, confused, and things like that. The goal has to be right for us, and it has to be beneficial, in order to ensure a beneficial process. But aside from that, it’s really the process that’s important.”

“What in the world would drive an author to write his own death into the script, and then sentence himself to that very death by turning his fiction into fact? The fact is, you and I are that ‘what the world.”

“Who in the world would walk into the very things that we created in order to save us from what we created by dying right in the middle of what we created? God did it by creating something called Christmas.”

“Jesus was born in a borrowed barn, he was buried in a borrowed tomb, and in-between it all he borrowed mankind’s sin with the intent of never returning it.”

“Some would say that paradise is the escapist ‘fiction’ of hapless minds caught up in the denial of a darkening world. But Christmas would say that the ‘paradise’ of escapist fiction has not a single shred of fiction in it at all.”