[IMG:L]Wondering how your favorite stars will be celebrating the holidays? Hollywood.com asked some of today’s biggest names where they’re planning to go, what their favorite memories are, and the holiday surprises they’re hoping to unwrap this year.
Nicolas Cage recalls what he thinks is “hands down the best Christmas present I ever got, because it was a tool to stimulate my imagination: My father was in Italy. He was on sabbatical and I had a little toy car that was being driven by Pinocchio. Pinocchio’s head fell off the day before Christmas–I played with it a little too roughly. My father picked up the head and he went into the garden and he planted it. I thought, “Why are you doing that?” The next morning was this enormous thing that had grown in the garden. I ripped it open and it was a giant wooden Pinocchio.”
“I was scratching my head trying to figure out how that grew,” Cage remembers. “And then I started planting everything. I planted all my Hot Wheels. I had a little G.I. Joe slipper. I thought if I planted that, it would grow really big and I could put my sleeping bag in it. So he really got me thinking in an imaginative way at a young age.”
[IMG:R]Katherine Heigl’s getting the best present of her life this year: new husband Josh Kelly. The couple is tying the knot over Christmas. “I’m having a smaller wedding,” she reveals, comparing it to the lavish ceremonies her character attends in her upcoming film 27 Dresses. “It’s a Christmas wedding, and so it’s a totally different vibe. What is kind of great about it is that I kind of got to have the best of both worlds. In fantasyland I got to have the beach wedding that was beautiful, fabulous, and wonderful. Hopefully my wedding will be just as nice.”
“We like to go to snow,” Will Smith says of his plans with wife Jada Pinkett and their clan. “And by ‘we’ I mean Jada likes to go to snow. I’d much rather be in Jamaica. But Jada has wonderful childhood memories of snow, so we try to find wherever there’s the most snow. She actually spends weeks online finding out where the most snow is and that’s where we end up going.”
[IMG:L]Smith says even with his blockbuster-built bank account, his kids aren’t expecting a massive holiday haul. “Willow just wants clothes,” he says of his daughter and I Am Legend co-star. “She’s dressed herself since she was about 4 years old. She is very specific about her style. She is very specific about how she wants to look, how she wants to present, the sizes and all that. It’s funny, she doesn’t like shopping. She wants you to think about her and she loves the idea that she gets things by surprise. Christmas really isn’t big for her. If she knows its coming it’s not as big of a deal. Jaden just wants his family around. Anything that causes the whole family to be together, that is what he wants.”
[IMG:R]Keira Knightley keeps it simple as well. “I don’t think I do Christmas traditions,” she says proudly. “I’m going to sleep, eat and drink, and that’s about it.” As far as finding presents for her, stay out of Radio Shack. “F*ck no, no gadgets!” she insists.
On the opposite end of the spectrum is Harry Connick Jr. “Deep down in my heart I love gadgets–I’m a gadget freak,” he admits. “I just got Popular Mechanics and was looking through there. There is some nutty stuff in there, stuff that I so don’t need. Just I love that stuff. iPhone stuff, GPS stuff, stuff that I so don’t need. I got a TomTom in my car and I have a GPS in my car. I have two of them. It’s ridiculous.”
It’s tougher to shop for Gerard Butler. “What can you get the man who has everything?” he laughs. “I don’t know–Slippers?”
[IMG:L]Gerard’s P.S. I Love You co-star Hilary Swank looks forward to one annual holiday activity: “To put sugar and green food coloring in my Christmas tree water, that is a tradition in my family. I’m going to be with my family this holiday but most holidays I’m traveling, promoting movies. I was asked to be in Europe promoting P.S. I Love You, and I said, ‘Please, please, please! I’ll go right up until the 21st when my movie opens, but please let me be home for Christmas!’ So I get to be home for Christmas this year.”
Jeff Bridges’ famous family will convene at his home this year. “We’ve got Christmas this year. I think we usually do it at [my brother] Beau’s house,” he says. Jeff remembers when his dad Lloyd delivered on the coolest gift ever. “Did you ever get a bike? Getting that bike for Christmas, I remember that was a big one for me … I was 8, maybe, but my brother Beau is 8 years older than I am, so he had the really cool bike. My bike was smaller–it had the cards in the spokes !”
[IMG:R]Travel is on Paula Abdul’s holiday itinerary. “I’m going to do splitting of hot weather and cold weather,” says the American Idol star. “I haven’t skied in so long I’m not sure if I remember how.”
“It’s a tradition in my family that we make Christmas cookies like my granny used too make,” declares Ashley Tisdale. “We make them every year and they’re the best cookies in the entire world. It’s so much fun because we make them together. Christmas is one of my favorite holidays–Christmas morning with all the presents underneath the tree. My favorite present ever was the Power Wheels Barbie Convertible. I was like 5 years old and I thought it was the coolest thing in the entire world. Obviously my idea of a great present has changed–now I want Christian Louboutin shoes!”
Giving to those in need is at the top of Dane Cook’s list. “Every year at Christmas I am back in L.A. We do a great night up at the Laugh Factory. We do a big Christmas day of shows for people who may be homeless or families who don’t have food to celebrate the holidays. So we invite them up to the club for five or six different shows where we serve everybody the whole meal with all the fixings. I started doing that years ago and I just found it to be very rewarding.”
[IMG:L]”Home” is all Juno’s Ellen Page is hoping for this season. “It’s going to be awesome. It’s going to be so good. I get a little cynical around Christmas time. I just can’t deal with all the consumer things. I’m really looking forward to pretend like I’m lying in my bed right now. It’s going to be really nice. Just to be home, put your head on your pillow.”
Meredith Vieira feels nostalgic for her favorite Christmas gift: “It’s going to sound silly, but this life-size doll,” she admits. “It’s like three feet tall and I loved it. Recently, I got it out of storage and one leg has fallen off already so it’s kind of scary-looking, but at the time I really loved it.”
Meredith’s Today Show sidekick Matt Lauer also has a sentimental favorite, even if there was a bit of commercial hook to his holiday loot. “My dad for a while was a bicycle salesman, and used me as kind of a neighborly marketing device,” says Matt. “I would get the newest hottest model of whatever bike they were introducing to the market, and then of course he would expect me to go out. It could be 22 degrees in snow, he would expect me to start riding it around the neighborhood that day because he wanted kids to see it and want it so they could go to the stores and get their own. I got a new bike every year for about five years, but it was purely a tool to sell other bicycles.”
[IMG:R]Gabrielle Union is still hoping to come up with a gift that will impress her finicky nephews. “This year I’m going to be a huge hero because I got the new Guitar Hero thing, but apparently I mess it up every year,” she reveals. “” thought I was doing great things getting them Hannah Montana tickets. You work with Disney enough times, these things come in handy. But my nephews were like, ‘She’s a girl. That’s…’ I can’t say exactly what they said. I was like, ‘Do you know what I did for these Hannah Montana tickets?’ They just were so not interested.”
“Holidays now for my kids is different than when I was coming up,” Morris Chestnut believes. “When I was coming up, I’d write down 10 things on the list and hopefully I’d get one or two. My wife spoils my kids, it’s like they know everything. They look at the package and say, ‘Okay, that’s going to be the XBox. You probably wrapped that in this.’ When I was my son’s age, he’s 10, I wanted a remote control car. Now he wants the iPhone. Times are different now. If it were up to me, he wouldn’t get it. He’s probably getting it … I tell them all the time, ‘You better be thankful for your mother, because I would teach you some lessons!'”
[IMG:L]”I just like to be with my family because we’re so spread out,” explains Allison Janney. “I’m going to go up to Maine and I am just really looking forward to just being in the same room with them all. That’s what means a lot to me now. It didn’t used to. I took it for granted and now I really really don’t. There’s always good food and just–we’re all in the same room together.”
“I’m going to go to Oregon,” says The Golden Compass’ Sam Elliott. “I’m going to take my 92-year-old mother to see this movie and I’m going to keep the fire burning and spend time with my animals and my family.”
Sam’s co-star Eva Green expects to be “like everybody in my family, around the Christmas tree eating good food – foie-gras.”
“Is there anything I would particularly love?”” wonders Atonement’s James McAvoy before a brainstorm. “I’d love a pair of crampons. I’m not even joking: Ice boots.”
[IMG:R]Linda Cardellini’s using her ER downtime to try a little adventuring this season. “I am going to take some ‘me’ time over the holidays and go visit my family, and then I’m going to Switzerland for New Year’s,” she says. “I’m going to travel around Europe for a little bit and then come back. I’ve never been there and a friend of mine is in a band and they’re playing at the top of some mountain in the snow somewhere and I figured, ‘Well, I’m sort of on yes binge so I’ll say yes that are presented that sound like fun.’ So I decided that I would go with them. I have a bunch of friends going.”
“For Christmas we have a new tradition, which is renting a house in Newport, Rhode Island where my wife is from and we stay there,” says Nip/Tuck star Dylan Walsh. “I like Christmas on the East Coast … It feels wintery, it feels right. It feels like Christmas, but Newport doesn’t get a particularly large amount of snow, but it might … it is the feel I remember growing up and it just feels right. We rent the house for long enough that we feel cozy there.”
[IMG:L]Charlie Murphy says his kids can’t wait to open the gift from their favorite uncle, Eddie Murphy. “They know who the rich person is. They know who to go to for the big stuff,” he says. “I’ll say no. I’ll be like, “What? Come on, man.” He’s gotten them all kinds of incredible stuff. What we do, my son who’s 8 gets little toys way before Christmas. Like a month before Christmas, we take all his old stuff and we give it away because there’d be no room. He has to give everything, has to trade the ones we haven’t been playing with and then he gets new stuff. We don’t throw it away, we give it away.”
“I’m just kind of looking forward to the fact that for me, Christmas has sort of atrophied a bit,” says Jason Bateman. “So now that I have a daughter that’s a year and a month , I can start to kind of live it through her eyes again. It’s sort of been rekindled for me.”
[IMG:R]But with all those warm holiday moments come those classic Christmas clashes, Jason admits. “My wife and I kind of had half an argument yesterday about the tree because my daughter just learned how to walk, so we have to really consider the tree and whether it is now a small tree that we can put up on a table so she can’t get to it and start pulling off ornaments or pull the tree over. Or do you get a full length tree–which is what I want because I’m a big baby when it comes to Christmas–and you just sort of trim the tree from about three feet up and leave the bottom naked? Or we can whip out the old dog cage and unfold that to go around it? And then she thought that would look a little too prison-ish, so then we took out different dog gates to sort of cordon off the living room. Now we can’t get in there. We can only sort of see the tree from afar.”
