Non-Muslims in Saudi Arabia can only celebrate Valentine's Day behind closed doors. Apparently, this has led to a huge black market for flowers and wrapping paper.

I worked for a big department store, and strangely, on my first day, they put me in charge of Christmas wrapping. I didn't know how to wrap a present and make it not look like it fell off a truck.

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.

Christmas is far and away my favorite holiday. I love everything about it, from the event that inspired it, hoping for a white one, to wrapping presents. But mostly I love having family and friends gathered, and sharing traditions.

For me growing up, Christmas time was always the most fantastic, exciting time of year, and you'd stay up until three in the morning. You'd hear the parents wrapping in the other room but you knew that also, maybe, they were in collusion with Santa Claus.

From the time that I can remember, I worked to make money - either baby-sitting, or one year wrapping gifts at a department store at Christmas, so I could have my own money.

To perceive Christmas through its wrappings becomes more difficult with every year.

I go into it with the attitude that I'm not going to look at my leg, and as soon as they get the wrapping off of it, I'm like, 'I've got to look.' It's like yelling at a dog going, 'Squirrel!' I cannot not look. And then I spend the rest of the time sitting there with a wet washcloth on my forehead trying to regain consciousness.

If you really want to possess a woman, you must think like her, and the first thing to do is win over her soul. The rest, that sweet, soft wrapping that steals away your senses and your virtue, is a bonus.

If anything or anyone removes peace from you or inflicts confusion and judgment on you, this thing or person is not of God regardless of whether or not that person or thing has wrapped itself/himself in the wrapping paper with God's face printed all over it. Don't stop believing in God but stop believing in that person, in that thing. The wrapping paper with God's face stamped all over it isn't really God.

So he came to realize that learning a language was perhaps the most profound thing a man could do. Not only did it require wrapping different sounds around the very movement of your soul, it involved learning things somehow already known, as though much of what he was somehow existed apart from him. A kind of enlightenment accompanied these first lessons, a deeper understanding of self.

It's my turn to see you through,' she whispers, coming back to me and wrapping me in her blanket as I lose my shit all over again. She holds me until I recover my Y chromosome.

From the time that I can remember I worked to make money - either baby-sitting or one year wrapping gifts at a department store at Christmas so I could have my own money.

To perceive Christmas through its wrappings becomes more difficult with every year.

For me growing up Christmas time was always the most fantastic exciting time of year and you'd stay up until three in the morning. You'd hear the parents wrapping in the other room but you knew that also maybe they were in collusion with Santa Claus.

Rock 'n' roll is ridiculous. It's absurd. In the past U2 was trying to duck that. Now we're wrapping our arms around it and giving it a great big kiss.