In the evening we hung up our stockings--or rather the biggest stockings we could borrow from the grown-ups--and before dawn we trooped in to open them while sitting on father's and mother's bed; and the bigger presents were arranged, those for each child on its own table, in the drawing-room, the doors to which were thrown open after breakfast.

I never knew any one else have what seemed to me such attractive Christmases, and in the next generation I tried to reproduce them exactly for my own children.
My father, Theodore Roosevelt, was the best man I ever knew.

He combined strength and courage with gentleness, tenderness, and great unselfishness.

He would not tolerate in us children selfishness or cruelty, idleness, cowardice, or untruthfulness.

As we grew older he made us understand that the same standard of clean living was demanded for the boys as for the girls; that what was wrong in a woman could not be right in a man.