Defend your beliefs with courtesy and with compassion, but defend them.

May I say to mothers collectively, in the name of the Lord, you are magnificent. You are doing terrifically well. The very fact that you have been given such a responsibility is everlasting evidence of the trust your Father in Heaven has in you.

We are not diminished when someone else is added upon.

Dads, is it too bold to hope that our children might have some small portion of the feeling for us that the Divine Son felt for His Father?

If for a while the harder you try, the harder it gets, take heart. So it has been with the best people who ever lived. (The Inconvenient Messiah, BYU Speeches, Feb 15, 1982)

Maybe the purchasing and the making and the wrapping and the decorating - those delightfully generous and important expressions of our love at Christmas - should be separated, if only slightly, from the more quiet, personal moments when we consider the meaning of the Baby (and his birth) who prompts the giving of such gifts.

One of the great consolations . . . is that because Jesus walked such a long, lonely path utterly alone, we do not have to do so.