Quotes About Tradition

When you're dealing with African Americans, family is everything. Because we spend so much time talking about how one treats one's family. Telling a black person that you haven't talked to your mother in a week is probably different than it is with other races because people will look at you different.

I rarely saw my Grandma Markle, as she hailed from New Hampshire and spent much of her life in Pennsylvania and Florida. To bridge that gap, she would always send scrapbooks, care packages, and boxes of treats made from family recipes.

My sister, mom, and I always make holiday treats like Christmas cutout cookies and red and green chocolate chip cookies.

Before we took down the tree each year, Dad would always say a prayer that we would be together the next Christmas. I cling to that prayer, which serves as a reminder that it's important to be grateful in the present for the people you love because, well, you never know.

The holidays are a time to - not quite play it safe - but play it classic. You don't want to be the girl in a head-to-toe sequin look, where you look like you should be an ornament on the tree.

Hardcover and paperback forever. Someone carve that into a tree.

My parents were both born in Birmingham, Alabama, and come from large Catholic families with lots of Michaels, Marks, and Patricks, so they wanted to choose two names that I don't think you could find anywhere else in the family tree: Haley and Joel.

I love doing the tree and the Christmas decorations.

Even as a little kid I knew that spinning a dreidel on the floor for literal pennies was a sad consolation for the joys of trimming a Christmas tree.

I'm a very traditional person. The tattoos are about my grandmother dying and they tell the story about my mother and father, my brothers and my sister, my kids. It's pretty much a family tree on my arm with my life in football too.

My grandparents, one Christmas, they did not have anything. They did not have money to buy presents. So my grandmother went to the orange tree outside her home, and so her boys did not go without for Christmas, she took oranges to her sons as presents.

On Christmas morning, before we could open our Christmas presents, we would go to this stranger's home and bring them presents. I remember helping clean the house up and putting up a tree. My father believed that you have a responsibility to look after everyone else.

My love of baking might have originated with my grandmother. She had a lemon tree growing in her backyard, and one of my favorite memories is of picking lemons together and then baking lemon bars.

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.

I loved 'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.' I read it later as an adult, but I loved 'We Have Always Lived in a Castle.' And that brings you around to 'The Lottery.' You can't pretend - it's a lottery in which you draw a name and people die. That's a short story, but it's such an incredible short story.

I haven't actually checked my family tree, but Rutherford is a very old Scottish name, so I've probably got Scottish genes a few generations back.

Jazz and Cuba are inexorably tied together; it's not a branch from a tree. Latin music is part of the root of jazz.

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.

Everyone in my family has been in music - my cousins, my grandmother, my grandfather - so it's quite a big family tree.

As a child, I saw my mother prepare for Christmas every year, and it never occurred to me that labor was involved. I thought it was my mother's joy and privilege to hang tinsel on the tree strand by strand, to make sure that every room in the house had a touch of Christmas, down to the Santa-themed rug and hand towels in the bathroom.

The Christmas tree goes up on December 1. I love it.

I put up my Christmas tree entirely too early. I'm one of those people.

We celebrated Christmas. Not religiously, but we did the tree and the lights. Hannukah always seemed not quite as thrilling - Sorry to my Jewish brothers and sisters! But when you're a kid, Santa and all that, you know, that really trumps the menorah. So we did Christmas.

My mom's really into Christmas ornaments and our tree's lavish and beautiful.