Quote of the Day: Dale Evans on Parenting & Family

The wrapping paper is piling up, the kitchen timer is barking, and your phone keeps lighting up with messages you haven’t answered. Someone in the next room looks disappointed; someone else looks exhausted. In the middle of all this seasonal performance, you catch yourself wondering what, exactly, you’re trying to prove, or purchase. That’s when a quieter definition of the day breaks through: “Christmas, my child, is love in action. Every time we love, every time we give, it’s Christmas.”

Dale Evans doesn’t treat Christmas as a date circled on a calendar; she treats it as a verb. The genius of the line is its refusal to let the holiday remain decorative. Love, in her telling, is not a warm feeling you wait to have, it’s a choice you make that costs you something: attention, patience, pride, time. The measure of the season isn’t how bright the lights look from the curb, but whether our care crosses the threshold into the concrete.

There’s theology underneath this, but also plain realism. If Christmas is about love entering the world, then it has to arrive in ways you can touch: a chair pulled out for a stranger, a call to the person you’re avoiding, an apology that doesn’t come with footnotes. Evans democratizes the “magic” of December, no tree required. Where love becomes behavior, and generosity becomes habit, the holiday is present and alive.

She earned the right to say it. Known to millions as the Queen of the West and partner to Roy Rogers, Evans used fame for service, writing, advocating, and turning personal grief into public compassion through her work on adoption and disability awareness.

December 25 doesn’t need more mythology; it needs more practice. Today, make Christmas small on purpose: give your best ten minutes to someone lonely, offer forgiveness before you feel ready, or spend less on things and more on people. In Evans’s accounting, that is the day, again.