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I used to spend my holidays there in my grandparents' large family house, with my numerous cousins. When I die, I am going to be buried in the village cemetery.

I was the youngest of four kids, and Dad, who had a garden centre before he retired, came from a large Lancashire family. Every one of my uncles had their own business, including a post office, two fish and chip shops and a painting and decorating business.

I've got too many of my friends that retired and went home and got on a rocking chair, and about a year and a half later, I'm always going to the cemetery.

My family's business was actually an amusement park in New Orleans. My grandfather had started that, and my grandmother was a dance maven in New Orleans. It was just the theatricality and the Mardi Gras and the pageantry that I fell in love with at an early age.

I grew up in a funeral home. Both my parents were morticians.

I was raised on a family farm in western Minnesota. So I didn't have the background to prepare me for this business life.

My father loved antique shops and shows, and quite a bit of my childhood involved outings to dim, dusty places packed with cast-off treasures.

When I was young, my family didn't go on outings to the circus or trips to Disneyland. We couldn't afford them. Instead, we stayed in our small rural West Texas town, and my parents took us to cemeteries.

When I was growing up, I was regularly involved in local activities such as food collections, food kitchens, and other initiatives.

I grew up in a small town in Alabama, and there wasn't much in the way of entertainment, so like our older siblings before us, we drove our pickup trucks out into the hayfield and lit a bonfire.