Jane Lynch Quotes

After church on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, my family would go chop down our Christmas tree. Once it was home and placed in its stand, Mom and I would painstakingly decorate our tree. It took hours to place the tinsel, string the lights, find the perfect spot for my favorite macaroni and felt ornaments from kindergarten.

Christmas was always a big holiday in our family. Every Christmas Eve before we'd go to bed, my mom and dad would read to us two or three stories and they would always be 'The Happy Prince,' 'The Gift of the Magi' and 'Twas the Night Before Christmas,' and I would like to keep that alive.

Why not share with the world the way it is and tell them my feelings about my cat, and how I played with my kids, and how addicted to Christmas time I am, and the smell of pine needles and hearing my kids laugh.

And I come here as a daughter, raised on the South Side of Chicago - by a father who was a blue-collar city worker and a mother who stayed at home with my brother and me.

When I was a kid, we didn't eat in restaurants much, but a good report card meant my sister or I could choose anyplace in town for a dinner out, and I always picked Benny's, a dive bar near the train station, because they had the best nachos around.

'A Christmas Story' has always meant a lot to me personally.

The sharpest memory of our old-fashioned Christmas eve is my mother's hand making sure I was settled in bed.

Every year, like a good Catholic, I wait for Christmas. Putting up the lights, decorating the tree, making sweets and then unwrapping gifts on Christmas morning... it's a tradition my family has followed since I was very little.

In terms of foods for me, I think I have more of the usual associations - foods from childhood that I associate with care and love, from relatives or special restaurants like the kind elderly man who dusted seasoning salt on French fries at the corner burger joint.

The way my family always did Christmas was on Christmas Eve, it wasn't really centered around a dinner on Christmas Eve. It was more about keeping the kids calm. Sometime after dark is when we were going to open all the presents underneath the tree from Mom, Dad and the kids and everything - just the family presents was every Christmas Eve.

'A Christmas Story' has become such a special part of the holiday season for so many families.

When I was a little kid, my mother and I used to watch the 'Golden Globes' and I would dress up and she would get sparkling apple cider and we would make a tray of hors d'oeuvres and watch it together. And I would get up and make a pretend speech.

I remember going to McDonald's for the first time probably when I was in college. And then I remember going and visiting a friend in Wyoming, and he said, 'We're going to do something special. We're going to McDonald's.'

Christmases past, my sister Carolyn and I - we'd been waiting for Santa all night. Nothing! Where is this man?

I've been in Chicago for every Christmas of my life.

We always go to downtown Oklahoma City to look at all the Christmas lights that have been put up... We go to the Christmas Eve service at church, and we always beg my parents to open a present - just one present - on Christmas Eve. We get them to cave.

If I'm honest, the thing I remember the most was the team mascot, Freddie the Falcon. I really remember there was a McDonald's nearby, and I remember eating a cheeseburger in the playground when the Falcon appeared. I'm not sure my dad appreciates that being my favorite memory of him playing.

I still remember watching 'Antiques Roadshow' as a child with my parents, on a Sunday night, sitting in our 1970s living room.

When I was a kid, getting on Lake Shore Drive from the south side to go downtown was magical.

The smells of Christmas are the smells of childhood [p. 53]

Growing up, Santa Claus would cover the presents with a white blanket, so when we'd wake up Christmas morning, we had to wait for my dad to do the big reveal of all the presents Santa brought.

The problem is that we let special-occasion food become everyday food. That goes for soda and french fries.

Christmas, in fact, is not an external event at all, but a piece of one's home that one carries in one's heart: like a nursery story, its validity rests on exact repetition, so that it comes around every time as the evocation of one's whole life and particularly of the most distant bits of it in childhood.

I think sitting in the car with your parents and listening to music is an essential to growing up.

Part of my passion for all things Christmas is seeing my holiday stuff again every December. I suppose I do have more than most folks, so the reunion each winter keeps me in the holiday spirit for a full year. And there are always a few pieces out in my house whatever the month.