Christmas Quotes

I've gathered together a collection of Christmas quotes on this page - everything from little poems and funny sayings to old-fashioned holiday greetings and some modern Christmas humour. To make it easier to recognise the quotations I have ordered them alphabetically.

If you've got the stamina, it can be nice to include a hand-written quote in your Christmas card.

"A Christmas candle is a lovely thing;
It makes no noise at all,
But softly gives itself away;
While quite unselfish, it grows small."
Eva K Logue

"A Christmas gambol oft could cheer
The poor man's heart through half the year."
Walter Scott

"A little smile, a word of cheer,
A bit of love from someone near,
A little gift from one held dear,
Best wishes for the coming year."
John Greenleaf Whittier

"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 Seuss

"Are you willing to believe that love is the strongest thing in the world - stronger than hate, stronger than evil, stronger than death - and that the blessed life which began in Bethlehem nineteen hundred years ago is the image and brightness of the Eternal Love? Then you can keep Christmas."
Henry Van Dyke

"At Christmas, all roads lead home."
Marjorie Holmes

"As long as we know in our hearts what Christmas ought to be, Christmas is."
Eric Sevareid

"At Christmas play and make good cheer, For Christmas comes but once a year."
Thomas Tusser

"At this festive season of the year, Mr Scrooge," said the gentleman, taking up a pen, "it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. ... We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices."
Charles Dickens (A Christmas Carol)

"Best of all, Christmas means a spirit of love, a time when the love of God and the love of our fellow men should prevail over all hatred and bitterness, a time when our thoughts and deeds and the spirit of our lives manifest the presence of God."
George F McDougall

"Bless us Lord, this Christmas, with quietness of mind; Teach us to be patient and always to be kind."
Helen Steiner Rice

"Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love."
Hamilton Wright Mabi

"But I am sure that I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round...as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely."
Charles Dickens (A Christmas Carol)

"Christmas Eve was a night of song that wrapped itself about you like a shawl. But it warmed more than your body. It warmed your heart...filled it, too, with melody that would last forever."
Bess Streeter Aldrich (Song of Years)

"Christmas day is a day of joy and charity. May God make you very rich in both."
Phillips Brooks

"Christmas gift suggestions: To your enemy, forgiveness. To an opponent, tolerance. To a friend, your heart. To a customer, service. To all, charity. To every child, a good example. To yourself, respect."
Oren Arnold

"Christmas, in its final essence, is for grown people who have forgotten what children know. Christmas is for whoever is old enough to have denied the unquenchable spirit of man."
Margaret Cousins

"Christmas is a bridge. We need bridges as the river of time flows past. Today's Christmas should mean creating happy hours for tomorrow and reliving those of yesterday."
Gladys Tabor

"Christmas is a day of meaning and traditions, a special day spent in the warm circle of family and friends."
Margaret Thatcher

"Christmas is a time when everybody wants his past forgotten and his present remembered. What I don't like about office Christmas parties is looking for a job the next day."
Phyllis Diller

"Christmas is doing a little something extra for someone."
Charles Schulz

"Christmas is for children. But it is for grownups too. Even if it is a headache, a chore, and nightmare, it is a period of necessary defrosting of chill and hide-bound hearts."
Lenora Mattingly Weber

"Christmas is forever, not for just one day,
for loving, sharing, giving, are not to put away
like bells and lights and tinsel, in some box upon a shelf.
The good you do for others is good you do yourself."
Norman W Brooks, "Let Every Day Be Christmas"

"Christmas is most truly Christmas when we celebrate it by giving the light of love to those who need it most."
Ruth Carter Stapleton

"Christmas is not a time nor a season, but a state of mind. To cherish peace and goodwill, to be plenteous in mercy, is to have the real spirit of Christmas."
Calvin Coolidge

"Christmas ... is not an eternal event at all, but a piece of one's home that one carries in one's heart."
Freya Stark

"Christmas is, of course, the time to be home - in heart as well as body."
Garry Moore

"Christmas is the day that holds time together."
Alexander Smith

"Christmas is the gentlest, loveliest festival of the revolving year - and yet, for all that, when it speaks, its voice has strong authority."
WJ Cameron

"Christmas is the keeping-place for memories of our innocence."
Joan Mills

"Christmas is the season for kindling the fire of hospitality in the hall, the genial flame of charity in the heart."
Washington Irving

"Christmas is the season of joy, of holiday greetings exchanged, of gift-giving,and of families united."
Norman Vincent Peale

"Christmas is the season when you buy this year's gifts with next year's money."
Author Unknown

"Christmas, my child, is love in action. ... Every time we love, every time we give, it's Christmas."
Dale Evans Rogers

"Christmas - that magic blanket that wraps itself about us, that something so intangible that it is like a fragrance. It may weave a spell of nostalgia. Christmas may be a day of feasting, or of prayer, but always it will be a day of remembrance - a day in which we think of everything we have ever loved."
Augusta E Rundel

"Christmas waves a magic wand over this world, and behold, everything is softer and more beautiful."
Norman Vincent Peale

"Christmas will always be in the hearts of God's children everywhere as they extend a helping hand to a friend in need ... as they go about reflecting God's goodness in the little quiet and unheralded expressions of a loving heart ... as they share the light of the world with those who live in darkness."
Jane Hillsmen

"Fail not to call to mind, in the course of the twenty-fifth of this month, that the Divinest Heart that ever walked the earth was born on that day; and then smile and enjoy yourselves for the rest of it; for mirth is also of Heaven's making."
Leigh Hunt

"From a commercial point of view, if Christmas did not exist it would be necessary to invent it."
Katharine Whitehorn

"Gifts of time and love are surely the basic ingredients of a truly merry Christmas."
Peg Bracken

"Great little One! whose all-embracing birth
Lifts Earth to Heaven, stoops Heaven to Earth."
Richard Crashaw

"Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days; that can recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth; that can transport the sailor and the traveller, thousands of miles away, back to his own fire-side and his quiet home!"
Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, 1836

"Have you any old grudges you would like to pay,
Any wrongs laid up from a bygone day?
Gather them now and lay them away
When Christmas comes.
Hard thoughts are heavy to carry, my friend,
And life is short from beginning to end;
Be kind to yourself, leave nothing to mend
When Christmas comes."
William Lytle

"He who has not Christmas in his heart will never find it under a tree."
Roy L Smith

"I can understand people simply fleeing the mountainous effort Christmas has become... but there are always a few saving graces and finally they make up for all the bother and distress."
May Sarton

"I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round, as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys."
Charles Dickens

"I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"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

"I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year."
Charles Dickens

"I wish we could put up some of the Christmas spirit in jars and open a jar of it every month."
Harlan Miller

"If there is no joyous way to give a festive gift, give love away."
Author Unknown

"It is the personal thoughtfulness, the warm human awareness, the reaching out of the self to one's fellow man that makes giving worthy of the Christmas spirit."
Isabel Currier

"It is the one season of the year when we can lay aside all gnawing worry, indulge in sentiment without censure, assume the carefree faith of childhood, and just plain "have fun." Whether they call it Yuletide, Noel, Weinachten, or Christmas, people around the earth thirst for its refreshment as the desert traveller for the oasis."
DD Monroe

"Let us remember that the Christmas heart is a giving heart, a wide open heart that thinks of others first. The birth of the baby Jesus stands as the most significant event in all history, because it has meant the pouring into a sick world of the healing medicine of love which has transformed all manner of hearts for almost two thousand years... Underneath all the bulging bundles is this beating Christmas heart."
George Matthew Adams

"Love came down at Christmas;
Love all lovely, love divine;
Love was born at Christmas,
Stars and angels gave the sign."
Christina Rossetti

"Love is what's in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening presents and listen."
Author unknown

"Mankind is a great, an immense family... This is proved by what we feel in our hearts at Christmas."
Pope John XXIII

"May Peace be your gift at Christmas and your blessing all year through!"
Author Unknown

"May we not "spend" Christmas or "observe" Christmas, but rather "keep" it."
Peter Marshall

"My first copies of Treasure Island and Huckleberry Finn still have some blue-spruce needles scattered in the pages. They smell of Christmas still."
Charlton Heston

"My idea of Christmas, whether old-fashioned or modern, is very simple: loving others. Come to think of it, why do we have to wait for Christmas to do that?"
Bob Hope

"Never worry about the size of your Christmas tree. In the eyes of children, they are all 30 feet tall."
Larry Wilde

"Oh, for the good old days when people would stop Christmas shopping when they ran out of money."
Author Unknown

"Oh look, yet another Christmas TV special! How touching to have the meaning of Christmas brought to us by cola, fast food, and beer.... Who'd have ever guessed that product consumption, popular entertainment, and spirituality would mix so harmoniously?"
Bill Watterson

"Oh! lovely voices of the sky
Which hymned the Saviour's birth,
Are ye not singing still on high,
Ye that sang, "Peace on earth"?"
Felicia Hemans

"One of the most glorious messes in the world is the mess created in the living room on Christmas day. Don't clean it up too quickly."
Andy Rooney

"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

"People can't concentrate properly on blowing other people to pieces if their minds are poisoned by thoughts suitable to the twenty-fifth of December."
Ogden Nash

"Perhaps the best Yuletide decoration is being wreathed in smiles."
Author Unknown

"Remember, if Christmas isn't found in your heart, you won't find it under a tree." 
Charlotte Carpenter

"Roses are reddish
Violets are bluish
If it weren't for Christmas
We'd all be Jewish."
Benny Hill

"Sing hey! Sing hey!
For Christmas Day;
Twine mistletoe and holly.
For a friendship glows
In winter snows,
And so let's all be jolly!"
Author Unknown

"Something about an old-fashioned Christmas is hard to forget.'"
Hugh Downs

"The best of all gifts around any Christmas tree: the presence of a happy family all wrapped up in each other."
Burton Hillis

"The Christmas season has come to mean the period when the public plays Santa Claus to the merchants."
John Andrew Holmes

"The Christmas spirit - love - changes hearts and lives."
Pat Boone

"The joy of brightening other lives, bearing others' burdens, easing other's loads and supplanting empty hearts and lives with generous gifts becomes for us the magic of Christmas."
WC Jones

"The only blind person at Christmastime is he who has not Christmas in his heart."
Helen Keller

"The perfect Christmas tree? All Christmas trees are perfect!"
Charles N Barnard

"The rooms were very still while the pages were softly turned and the winter sunshine crept in to touch the bright heads and serious faces with a Christmas greeting."
Louisa May Alcott

"There has been only one Christmas - the rest are anniversaries."
WJ Cameron

"There is no ideal Christmas; only the one Christmas you decide to make as a reflection of your values, desires, affections, traditions."
Bill McKibben

"There's nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child."
Erma Bombeck

"They err who thinks Santa Claus comes down through the chimney; he really enters through the heart."
Mrs Paul M Ell

"Unless we make Christmas an occasion to share our blessings, all the snow in Alaska won't make it "white"."
Bing Crosby

"Were I a philosopher, I should write a philosophy of toys, showing that nothing else in life need to be taken seriously, and that Christmas Day in the company of children is one of the few occasions on which men become entirely alive."
Robert Lynd

"What do you call people who are afraid of Santa Claus? Claustrophobic."
Author Unknown

"What is Christmas? It is tenderness for the past, courage for the present, hope for the future. It is a fervent wish that every cup may overflow with blessings rich and eternal, and that every path may lead to peace."
Agnes M Pharo

"Whatever else be lost among the years, Let us keep Christmas still a shining thing: Whatever doubts assail us, or what fears, Let us hold close one day, remembering Its poignant meaning for the hearts of men. Let us get back our childlike faith again."
Grace Noll Crowell

"Wouldn't life be worth the living
Wouldn't dreams be coming true
If we kept the Christmas spirit
All the whole year through?"
Author Unknown