A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.

The upheavals of adolescence silenced 'A Christmas Carol' for a few years. I became a firebrand atheist. Christmas - humbug! Too commercial! Then I became an agnostic. Christmas was a pro-forma affair basically a chore. Buy mother a book dad a new tie my brother and sister small gifts. Pretend thanks for the fountain pens and shirts I received.

My father died when I was young and I was raised by my grandmother Emma Klonjlaleh Brown. We could afford to eat chicken just once a year on Christmas.

It's hard and sometimes it's scary. It still amazes my mother. I went home for Christmas one year and there were fans all over the front lawn hoping to see me.

My mother would give my brothers and me a pile of catalogues and let us pick what we wanted for Christmas.

May I share with you my earliest memory of a political row? It was with my mother about the Queen - classic Freudian stuff shrinks would say. I was eight and refusing to watch the Queen's Christmas Day broadcast.

My mother died of metastatic colorectal cancer shortly before three P.M. on Christmas Day of 2008. I don't know the exact time of her death because none of us thought to look at a clock for a while after she stopped breathing.

Actually my mother and Alfie came for three weeks' Christmas vacation and stayed for 21 years. I guess my mother never went back because she was lonely.

The sharpest memory of our old-fashioned Christmas eve is my mother's hand making sure I was settled in bed.

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.

You see my mother was a district nurse until she died when I was 14 and we used to move from time to time because of her work.

Being a mother is quite tiring. There's not much time to do anything. You just rush around and it's hard work.

I believe every child has the right to a mother and a father. Men and women are not the same. That's not to say they're not entitled to equal rights but they are not the same.

I am the woman I grew to be partly in spite of my mother and partly because of the extraordinary love of her best friends and my own best friends' mothers and from surrogates many of whom were not women at all but gay men. I have loved them my entire life even after their passing.

All my friends' mothers were appalling women.

With over 3 million women battling breast cancer today everywhere you turn there is a mother daughter sister or friend who has been affected by breast cancer.

In their 30s women really start to live... they're not children anymore and they're not just mothers.

For any of us in this room today let's start out by admitting we're lucky. We don't live in the world our mothers lived in our grandmothers lived in where career choices for women were so limited.

When I get up and work out I'm working out just as much for my girls as I am for me because I want them to see a mother who loves them dearly who invests in them but who also invests in herself. It's just as much about letting them know as young women that it is okay to put yourself a little higher on your priority list.

My mother was very strong. Once she picked up a coconut and smashed it against my father's head. It taught me about women defending themselves and not collapsing in a heap.

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.

This land which we have watered with our tears and our blood is now our mother country and we are well satisfied to stay where wisdom abounds and gospel is free.

My mother is a great source of advice and wisdom and consolation for me.

Memory is the mother of all wisdom.