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.
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.
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.
My brothers and sisters, may the spirit of love which comes at Christmastime fill our homes and our lives and linger there long after the tree is down and the lights are put away for another year.
The only thing that ultimately matters is to eat an ice-cream cone, play a slide trombone, plant a small tree, good God, now you're free.
That free will was demonstrated in the placing of temptation before man with the command not to eat of the fruit of the tree which would give him a knowledge of good and evil, with the disturbing moral conflict to which that awareness would give rise...
Every December, I host a tree-trimming party. I serve chili with cornbread and lots of good wine. It's a wonderful party, and it shows how much adults like to play.
Race and class are extremely reliable indicators as to where one might find the good stuff, like parks and trees, and where one might find the bad stuff, like power plants and waste facilities.
A tree is known by its fruit; a man by his deeds. A good deed is never lost; he who sows courtesy reaps friendship, and he who plants kindness gathers love.
I've always loved the idea of mythologies linked to or underlying everyday life, like the kami gods of Shintoism, where every rock, tree and stream has its own little god associated with it.
We know the Lord makes His servants bold. The young boy Joseph who saw God the Father and His Son, Jesus Christ, in a grove of trees was transformed into a spiritual giant.
Do you see how the god always hurls his bolts at the greatest houses and the tallest trees. For he is wont to thwart whatever is greater than the rest.
Christ's fishermen should not meddle with men's law, for men' s law contains sharp stones and trees by which the net of God is broken, and the fish wend out of the world.
Jews have God's promise and if we Christians have it, too, then it is only as those chosen with them, as guests in their house, that we are new wood grafted onto their tree.
Sometimes leadership is planting trees under whose shade you'll never sit. It may not happen fully till after I'm gone. But I know that the steps we're taking are the right steps.
Acting and singing on 'One Tree Hill' was definitely one of the most incredible experiences of my life. I didn't even know I could act until I auditioned at the casting call for the part of Mia.
I love The Inn at Palmetto Bluff, an Auberge Property in Bluffton, South Carolina. It's a spectacular corner of the world, with massive old trees lined with Spanish moss, and alligators swimming in the river.
Do not be very upright in your dealings for you would see by going to the forest that straight trees are cut down while crooked ones are left standing.
It was the noise Of ancient trees falling while all was still Before the storm, in the long interval Between the gathering clouds and that light breeze Which Germans call the Wind's bride.
The autumn leaf falls faster than the trees grow faster. (La feuille d'automne descend plus vite - Que les arbres ne grandissent plus vite.)
