FROM THE VAULT: 10 CHRISTMAS QUOTES

From Bytes, December 17, 2013

"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 Suess, How the Grinch Stole Christmas

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“One can never have enough socks," said Dumbledore. "Another Christmas has come and gone and I didn't get a single pair. People will insist on giving me books.”

- J K Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

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

― Benjamin Franklin

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“Christmas can be celebrated in the school room with pine trees, tinsel and reindeers, but there must be no mention of the man whose birthday is being celebrated. One wonders how a teacher would answer if a student asked why it was called Christmas.” 

- Ronald Reagan

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“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

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“If you ever have to steal money from your kid, and later on he discovers it's gone, I think a good thing to do is to blame it on Santa Claus.”

- Jack Handey

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"I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six. Mother took me to see him in a department store and he asked for my autograph."

- Shirley Temple

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Silent night, holy night

All is calm, all is bright

Round yon Virgin Mother and Child

Holy Infant so tender and mild

Sleep in heavenly peace

Sleep in heavenly peace

- Joseph Mohr, writer of the lyrics to Silent Night (1816)

(The music was written by Franz Xavier Gruber. Mohr, a priest at a church in Oberndorf, Austria, had written the lyrics as a poem in 1816 but it was in 1818, wanting an original carol to perform at the Christmas Eve midnight mass, that he asked Gruber to put the poem to music. Gruber, the choirmaster at the church, composed the music in just a few hours enabling it to be performed that night. The story of the mice having chewed up the organ bellows, so that Mohr needed a carol that could be accompanied on guitar, is a later embellishment.)

Franz Xavier Gruber, writer of the music to Silent Night

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

- Bernard Manning

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"Bah!" said Scrooge, "Humbug!"

“ . . . Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas! What's Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in 'em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will," said Scrooge indignantly, "every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!"

- Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol