A holiday is when you celebrate something that's all finished up, that happened a long time ago and now there's nothing left to celebrate but the dead.
I was on holiday recently and I came home to find that one of the papers here had 'bikini'd' me on the beach. I was wearing a grossly unflattering costume and they had published photographs of me taken from behind. I looked dreadful. I went into our local newsagent and bought up every copy.
When I first told people I was writing a book, some would say that was interesting, but others thought it was some holiday project and I would lose interest. I think my parents thought the same thing, and they were surprised when I kept going. I'm not sure I thought I would keep going, but then it became a big part of my life.
I've just finished my next collection, Possible Side Effects, and I'm now working on a collection of holiday stories as well as a memoir about my relationship with my father.
My husband is always telling me: 'We're on holiday - we don't need to have an itinerary!' But I always want to see as much as I can. Sometimes, I come back from holiday needing a holiday.
Children crave routine and find listening to the same stories over and over again soothing. If you've grown weary of the holiday books you've read your kid 7,883 times, try adding 'dude' to the end of every line of dialogue.
A holiday vacation can mean sampling all kinds of new cuisine - whether it's Uncle Joe's award-winning chili or the exotic flavors of Nepal. If your little ones are fussy, be sure to ease mealtime hassles by bringing along a supply of the familiar foods they're accustomed to rejecting at home.
It seems astonishing to be paid for indulging in pure pleasure. For me to go to Coburg is rather as if a trainspotter was sent for a few weeks to Swindon or a chocoholic asked on holiday by Green and Black.
But to make a holiday record that involves favorite American songs and then also get to sing about Jesus birth, it just seemed like a real easy, subtle way to combine a couple of things that I love.
When my mother was born on 14 April, he named her after a Latin American holiday, the Day of Americas, that nobody knew about. My due date also happened to be 14 April.
From 1971 onwards, the Memorial Day holiday was officially observed on the last Monday in May and became the unofficial start of the summer, with barbecues, blockbuster movie openings and mattress sales.
Holiday binge-buying has deep roots in American culture: department stores have been associating turkey gluttony with its spending equivalent since they began sponsoring Thanksgiving Day parades in the early 20th century.
