November is auspicious in so many parts of the country: the rice harvest is already in, the weather starts to cool, and the festive glow which precedes Christmas has began to brighten the landscape.
Well, because I have twin seven-year-old boys, I enjoy the gift giving stuff a great deal. We do both Hanukkah and Christmas, so it is a costly, though extremely pleasing proposition.
Then, when I got in the military, I used to host - even in high school - I hosted the talent shows, and when I was in the military I would host all of our base Christmas parties and stuff.
I am a veteran of the War on Christmas. I am just emerging from a battlefield strewn with dead trees and torn shreds of brightly colored wrapping paper.
It's funny, I was talking to somebody who writes for a cop show, and he was saying how they aren't allowed to acknowledge Christmas, Thanksgiving, Valentine's Day, just because it has to be able to play forever.
I don't want to see people decorating a house or digging a garden. As for guys like Jonathan Ross, he got an award there last Christmas. What for? He doesn't sing, dance or tell jokes, does he?
In my experience, those who make the biggest fuss about not spending much at Christmas are generally the ones who buy what they want and eat where they want 12 months a year.
Most of the soap operas always use the Christmas special to kill huge quantities of their characters. So they have trams coming off their rails, or cars slamming into each other or burning buildings. It's a general clean-out.
Christmas is a season which almost all Christians observe in one way or another. Some keep it as a religious season. Some keep it as a holiday. But all over the world, wherever there are Christians, in one way or another Christmas is kept.
Dad bought me a toy drum one Christmas, and I eventually destroyed it. I wanted a real drum and he bought me a snare drum. Dad continued to buy me one drum after the other.
I think it's important not to grow up too fast. I'm 26 now, and I still can't wait for Christmas Day. The inner seven-year-old isn't buried too deeply in me.
I became hugely overweight and then hated myself because it was a form of self-abuse, something over which I had no control. I think the thing compulsive over-eaters want to achieve is that stuffed-full Christmas afternoon feeling.
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.
For me, the spirit of Christmas means being happy and giving freely. It's a tradition for all the kids in the family to help mom decorate the tree. Christmas is all about family, eating, drinking and making merry.
In my adolescence, I think I felt very outcast; I felt lonely. I felt great loneliness, and sometimes I wouldn't partake in Christmas, and I would go off and wander in the streets of Melbourne.
I remember as a child, my mother loved Dean Martin. Every Christmas, about the only Christmas album that we were able to listen to was the Dean Martin Christmas album.
Globalization has created this interlocking fragility. At no time in the history of the universe has the cancellation of a Christmas order in New York meant layoffs in China.
Now I'm an old Christmas tree, the roots of which have died. They just come along and while the little needles fall off me replace them with medallions.
For Christmas every year, my mother used to give me those cheap little diaries that would tell your horoscope and provide a little blank slot for each day.
I grew up playing games, and I remember Christmas 1981 when my dad got us an Intellivision, and we all sat around and played 'Astrosmash' for hours on end. It was a big part of my youth.
It's fun when you start a movie, because it's kind of like you get to go Christmas shopping... you get to make your wish list and you start thinking about what each character needs.
