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.

A title means marketing. It means that company's coming soon, and you'd better get out the Christmas lights so they don't miss your house.

My mom always makes the whole family pile into the car and drive around to look at the Christmas lights. My brother and I never want to do it, but my mom just loves it!

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.

Our many different cultures notwithstanding, there's something about the holidays that makes the planet communal. Even nations that do not celebrate Christmas can't help but be caught up in the collective spirit of their neighbors, as twinkling lights dot the landscape and carols fill the air. It's an inspiring time of the year.

I like indoor Christmas trees. And I like people who decorate their homes with lights and all that crap. I think it's a healthy outlet for them. If they weren't covering their lawns with twinkling lights, they'd be doing something that was really, really creepy.

Brits and Americans have hundreds of different phrases for the same thing. Luckily, it's usually a source of amusement rather than frustration. A flashlight by any other name is still a torch. My personal favourite is 'fairy lights,' which we boringly refer to as 'Christmas lights.'

Christmas lights may be the loneliest thing for me, especially if you mix them up with reindeers and sleighs. I feel alone. I feel isolated. I feel I do not belong.

It is always weird to be in the studio working on Christmas music in June and July, so we decorated the entire studio, we really did. We brought out lights, fake trees and decorated the place to get in the Christmas spirit. You'd leave the studio, and it'd be 100 degrees out in Nashville, but nonetheless, a great experience.

The truth is the Super Bowl long ago became more than just a football game. It's part of our culture like turkey at Thanksgiving and lights at Christmas, and like those holidays beyond their meaning, a factor in our economy.

I love Christmas. I really do love Christmas. I love being with my family and I love snow. I love the music and the lights and all of it.

Some of my favorite records growing up were Christmas albums. The ones I liked best were the albums that you could listen to from start to finish. You could put them on while you're decorating the tree or driving around looking at Christmas lights.

My Barbies were usually naked. Once, I took their heads off, cut their hair, drew on their short, spiky hair with some markers, then stuck the heads on Christmas lights. Every year, we'd string our tree with those Barbie heads. It looked demonic. My parents were so cool - they saw it as a form of self-expression.

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.

'School Daze' was one of the highlights of my life because it was the first chance I had to act on screen. I would have been happy if that had been it, because I proved that I could do it.

I used to look like a deer in headlights on the red carpet. You step out of the car and it's bedlam. Everyone's got crazy eyes.

Food is the only snobbery allowed. Imagine pulling up in your expensive car alongside somebody at the lights with a cheap car and saying, 'Is that all you've got?' But people do it with food.

If you look at landscape in historical terms, you realize that most of the time we have been on Earth as a species, what has fallen on our retina is landscape, not images of buildings and cars and street lights.

When kids run up to me and ask, 'What happened?' I just lean over and whisper, 'Cigarettes.' And once I was in a car and this girl at traffic lights was giving me the eye. She could only see my head, so I decided to do a 360 in the car seat to freak her out. Her face was like, 'Whoa, what is going on?' She sped off really quickly.

I hooked up my accelerator pedal in my car to my brake lights. I hit the gas, people behind me stop, and I'm gone.

I replaced the headlights in my car with strobe lights, so it looks like I'm the only one moving.

It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

I threw my son, Brandon, a rave for his birthday and I fully set it up like a crazy rave with lights and sound, me and my partner DJ'd - I got Mix Master Mike from the Beastie Boys to come DJ for a bit.

As I approach my 88th birthday, it's become apparent to me that my eyes and ears, among other appurtenances, aren't quite what they used to be. The prospect of long flights to wherever in search of whatever are not quite as appealing.