The reason I did the book about holidays is that you're a different person on holiday. You're sleeping somewhere unfamiliar, knocking about with people you've never met and for 10 days you're someone else. You're out of your comfortable zone.
In our open society, we are inclined to give to the less fortunate for the pure goodness of giving. We open our home to those who are alone on this holiday to spread some warmth into the life of another.
Since I'm always working, my best holiday memories are definitely when I can just go home and spend time with my family.
My father was in the civil service. I can remember standing in a bus shelter in the pouring rain, and that we were allowed candy floss at the end of the holiday if we had behaved.
Halloween was definitely the biggest holiday when I was a kid. We started making our Halloween costumes in August. Me and my mom. My mom was a single mom; it was just her and I.
The best vocalists I can think of are female. There is no singer I can think of who can touch Ella Fitzgerald. And when Billie Holiday sings, she's merciless about it. Her voice has just this immaculate sadness - even in happy songs, there was something that was so broken about it.
Having a birthday around the holidays was never easy and, with every successive year, it felt more and more as if celebrating my birthday got thrown into the December holiday mix as an afterthought.
I tried snowboarding at 14, and I absolutely fell in love with it. I snowboarded every day off I had, every weekend I had off of school, every holiday we had off from school, and it became a huge part of my life, not just what I love to do, but really just kind of who I was.
I hate Halloween. I hate dressing up. I hate - I wear wigs, makeup, costumes every day. Halloween is like, my least favorite holiday.
If you think Independence Day is America's defining holiday, think again. Thanksgiving deserves that title, hands-down.
I love oldies just kind of sweet, slinky, Fifties music. The slow stuff. And Billie Holiday.
I've just finished my next collection, Possible Side Effects, and I'm now working on a collection of holiday stories as well as a memoir about my relationship with my father.
When I go on holiday, I go to places that have animals I'm interested in.
It used to bug me that I couldn't even afford to take my family for a proper holiday. I didn't have any professional knowledge, and getting a photographer's job in a magazine was out of the question. So, armed with a Pentax K1000, I started going to various maidans of Mumbai, looking for subjects.
In August most of Europe goes on holiday.
There are a lot of Grinches out there that would like nothing better than to take any references to religion out of the holiday season.
Back when I was 15 or 16, in Dallas there was a department store called Sanger-Harris. One holiday season, I got a job as a gift wrapper there. The others were all experts who did that job every year, and I was by far the youngest person, who was totally inexperienced. In those days, department stores around Christmastime were a total frenzy.
When I go on holiday and people ask me what I do, I tell them I do some internet stuff and I've done a couple of books and I hope they just leave it at that.
I'm not a good time-off person. I'm awful on holiday. It comes from having that period when I didn't work. That really was the worst bit.
But to make a holiday record that involves favorite American songs and then also get to sing about Jesus birth, it just seemed like a real easy, subtle way to combine a couple of things that I love.
No holiday, no job, no amount of money, not even my own security can mean more to me than my love for God.
Seems like Americans just want it to be Halloween all year. The holiday just keeps getting more popular.
Every man who possibly can should force himself to a holiday of a full month in a year, whether he feels like taking it or not.
When it's all said and done, jazz with a capital J is where I'm coming from. Dexter Gordon, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk - that's what I really studied when I was a teenager and what really fueled my passion.
I have the ability to sing with emotion and feeling, but if you say I sound like Billie Holiday, that's cool. Let's look at who Billie was: she was this person, this singer, this beautiful diva who could move the audience with the slightest gesture of her hand.
I grew up listening to Beethoven and old jazz singers like Billie Holiday, Nina Simone and Anita O'Day. But those were, like, the only women I listened to - I hated women pop singers.
My first holiday to San Francisco in 1998-99 was supposed to be a two-week vacation but I ended up staying five weeks and nearly didn't come home.
I have a huge costume section in my closet - wigs, mustaches, the whole thing. Halloween's my favorite holiday, so I have a lot of weird stuff.
With all of the holiday cheer in the air, it's easy to overlook the ingredients in the foods. Ingredients such as salt, sugar, and fat - all of which leads to diseases such as high blood pressure, diabetes, strokes, heart disease, and cancer.
In singing, there's a vibration that comes from deep down inside, literally from your sex. When you put out that vibration, people can feel it. Billie Holiday does it. Peggy Lee does it. It's very hot.
I am not into action and adventure on holiday; that doesn't really do it for me. I would much rather go and lie down.
I'm one of these people that if I have a nice holiday - like I have had in Turkey repeatedly - I go back a lot.
I've made my own music, and the way I've always described it is Peggy Lee with an electric guitar, or Billie Holiday with some PJ Harvey in there.
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.
Dia de Los Muertos is a holiday that pays tribute to the dead and also celebrates life. So I thought, what better of an idea to bring it in with PETA and let people know how we can respect the living and the dead. Going vegetarian could be an incredible option for people if they would just educate themselves.
When Billie Holiday sings a song, I hear the song, but I always hear her and her truth.
