Interview: Soap Stars Share the Magic of the Holiday Season, Part 1

Alison Sweeney (pictured, Sami, Days of Our Lives): I get to experience the magic of Christmas all over again with my son, Ben. A funny memory I have of Christmas last year is Ben kept saying to everyone “Very Christmas!” instead of “Merry Christmas!” It was the cutest thing!

Eric Winter (ex-Rex, Days): My favorite Christmas tradition was always the part where I’d wake up and my mom — or was it Santa? — would place my stocking on my bed for me to have when I’d wake up. For some reason, the fun stuff I’d get in my stocking would be more exciting than actually sitting around the tree and opening gifts. To this day I still get a stocking from my mom.

Eileen Davidson (Ashley, The Young and the Restless): I was born and raised in Southern California, so snow around the holidays just never happened. In fact, I had never seen snow before. So when I was about 8 years old, my mom and dad took me and my six brothers and sisters up to the local mountains (about a three-hour drive from home) for a week over Christmas. They had rented a log cabin for us. We got a tree from the forest and woke up Christmas morning to a blanket of white snow everywhere. It was a very magical Christmas!

Marsha Clark (ex-Hillary, Guiding Light): Since GL taped a month or so in advance, we always got a jump-start on the Christmas merriment. Because the sets were decorated for the season and story lines were involved with the holiday festivities, our Christmas celebrations (in Springfield) started in November!

The wonderful Charita Bauer, who played matriarch Bert Bauer, was our “Santa,” distributing her own thoughtful hand-picked gifts to the cast and crew when Christmas actually arrived (in New York) in December.

Charita and I both lived near each other and would often leave work at the same time. Some of my fondest yuletide memories are of walking home from the studio with Charita through the snowy streets of Manhattan, listening to her hilarious stories and peeking at the holiday audio-animatronics displays in the store windows. Actually, Charita’s warmth, kindness and humor kept the holiday spirit going year-round!

Kyle Lowder (Rick, The Bold and the Beautiful): I moved to New York with my family when I was 3 years old. I believe there is no place like Christmas in New York. I know I am not the only one who feels that way. It is the absolute tradition — I’ve been doing it ever since I moved away from home, and now my wife joins me on the trip. Always Christmas in New York with the family. My parents live only about 30 miles north of Manhattan in the suburbs. So we’re always down to Manhattan seeing the Rockefeller Center tree, the 5th Avenue windows, and everything you can do tradition-wise in Manhattan, we are there doing it. That is something I make an effort to do every year. I’ve missed only two Christmases in New York since 1985, and that’s because my parents were living in Tokyo for my dad’s job. But if they are here, I am in New York with them, and I hope that’s a tradition that never ends.