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.