Each Christmas Eve, my children all settle in around me as I sit to read Clement Moore's 'Twas the Night Before Christmas'. It's a Public Speaking moment I look forward to every year.

Reading the written word aloud is a special part of the fear of Public Speaking that doesn't get a lot of attention. In fact, it may be a core aspect of the fear, dating back to the days we were asked to read sentences from the board, or religious passages in church classes, or give the dreaded oral book report.

The Christmas holiday provides a reason for two speakers, Rich Hopkins and Denise Graveline. to offer helpful advice on interpretive reading. Both provide audio examples.

Breakfast will come late this morning because we were up, most of us, late into the eve of this holiday, savoring how festive the darkness can be. And before breakfast is long over and the first toy has been broken, the first tears dried, dusk will be gathering outside again. That is the unfailing gift of this season — to comfort us with so much nightfall, to gather us together, and hold us close.

Another excellent observation on the seasons from The Times, this one unsigned.

Every year, I give out Sidney Awards to the best magazine essays of the year. In an age of zipless, electronic media, the idea is to celebrate (and provide online links to) long-form articles that have narrative drive and social impact.

I don't remember following The Sidney Awards from David Brooks, but this seems to be a remarkable list of essays and essayists that he's named. I need to track down the pieces he's named; you can see the nominations by clicking through for the original piece.

A second batch of awards was published on December 29.

Here we sit as evening falls
Like old horses in their stalls.
Thank you, Father, that you bless
Us with food and an address
And the comfort of your hand
In this great and blessed land.
Look around at each dear face,
Keep each one in your good grace.
We think of those who went before,
And wish we could have loved them more.
Grant to us a cheerful heart,
Knowing we must soon depart
To that far land to be with them.
And now let's eat. Praise God. Amen.

Gary Johnson's graceful spin on "bless the meat." Nicely done. Heartfelt, I think, and worth remembering.

Excellence isn't about meeting the spec, it's about setting the spec. It defines what the consumer sees as quality right this minute, and tomorrow, if you're good, you'll reset that expectation again.

The surefire way to achieve excellence, then, is not to create a written spec and match it. The surefire way is to be human. To be artistic: to make a connection with the customer and to somehow change them for the better. The reason Tom and I and others can continue to write about excellence twenty-five years later is that we're not writing about business at all. We're writing about people.

When the Ritz-Carlton hotel empowers every employee from chambermaid to manager to "make things right," they're not engaging in the sort of quality control most managers are comfortable with. In fact, if they were able to write down exactly what to do in every situation, the excellence factor would disappear. What the hotel accomplishes with its policy is this: they challenge their employees to become artists.

The art of connection, the art of being human, the art of making a difference. Artists do things that have never been done before. They dig deep to create passion. They connect by changing things for the better.

Seth Godin states the challenging truth at tompeters.com. Maybe it's shocking to read about artistry in business life. What's really shocking is that we all don't recognize our need to be artists.

Must have been the day for artistry posts. Later in the day I saw this post by Douglas Crets at Fast Company

Why do I write about this in Fast Company? I believe there is a strong parallel between the will of an artist and the management of a company, especially in an economic domain fueled by openness. I also believe that while corporate structures certainly give us the barriers and foundations that allow a given product set to thrive and prosper, they also inhibit...

3. Be playful. Artists are good with starting out with a blank canvas and deciding what it is once they make it into what it is. Stop thinking so much about fitting into a protocol and just push it out. What comes out of your head, Zeus-like, might be not only original, but practical. Use that.