Christmas is over, but CBS still has an annual gift for viewers to enjoy tonight with the Kennedy Center Honors.

The awards were handed out earlier this month, and the show taped for presentation from 9 to 11 p.m. today. Caroline Kennedy returns as the host.

It’s always an entertaining evening watching the honorees’ lives unfold in profiles and hearing and seeing others perform tributes to them.

As usual, there’s something for everyone — works from “Good Vibrations” to “GoodFellas,” a Motown toast, a comic whiz kid and a classical pianist who fought his way back after being told his playing days were over.

The range of the recipients and their work allows the audience to learn something about different art forms. Still, it would be hard to find people who haven’t heard Brian Wilson’s Beach Boys songs or Diana Ross’ hits with The Supremes or watched Steve Martin’s comic antics.

Those celebrities join filmmaker Martin Scorsese, whose most recent movie is “The Departed,” and Leon Fleisher, a noted pianist and conductor who overcame the medical odds to take his seat with President and Mrs. Bush in the honorees’ box tonight.

The recipients were selected by the Kennedy Center board as well as through suggestions by past award winners. The criterion is simply excellence in their field.

Martin, 62, perhaps best known as being the wild and crazy guy in those old “Saturday Night Live” sketches, is a man for many seasons. He began as a banjo-playing comedian and went on to become an accomplished actor, playwright and commentator.

Who can forget his King Tut dance and arrow-through-the-head bit? But who knew he was an expert balloon-animal maker at Disneyland, where he also practiced magic. A lot of people liked him a lot as the dad in his “Father of the Bride” movies.

Ross was one of six kids living in the Detroit projects when she beat the odds and went on to become what the Guinness Book of Records calls “the most successful female musical artist of the 20th century with 70 hit singles.”

The honorees don’t speak for themselves at the ceremonies, but Ross has said in the past that “you just can’t sit there and wait for people to give you the golden dream; you’ve got to get out there and make it happen for yourself.”

She’s had a litany of super hits, with The Supremes and on her own, such as “Stop! In the Name of Love,” “I Hear a Symphony” and “No Mountain High Enough,” which could have been her theme song. Vanessa Williams sings “Touch Me in the Morning” as a tribute tonight.

One criticism of the Kennedy Honors is that the performers often don’t do the honorees’ biggest hits or best-known and beloved works.

So viewers will undoubtedly appreciate hearing Hootie & the Blowfish perform Wilson’s “I Get Around,” but the show may leave the audience wanting more of its favorite Beach Boys songs.

Wilson is characterized by Burt Bacharach in a Kennedy Center profile as one of the greatest innovators ever. The Beach Boys became America’s band, and there’s never been anything quite like Wilson’s early work.

There isn’t anything in the movie business quite like Scorsese’s films. He was born in New York and entered the seminary out of high school, but soon decided a cleric’s career wasn’t for him and switched to film school.

He practiced his own religion by making signature movies such as “Taxi Driver,” “Mean Streets,” “Raging Bull,” “The Last Temptation of Christ” and “The Aviator.” Scorsese is celebrated for the way he cuts his scenes and the manner in which he uses music.

His films have frequently been violent and controversial but almost always recognized for their unique look and feeling.

When he was just 16, Fleisher was called one of the most gifted younger pianists of his era by The New York Times, and later he was dubbed “the pianist find of the century.”

Then, at the height of his career, he was diagnosed with a rare neurological disease and lost the use of his right hand. Doctors told him his playing days were over. He told himself that wasn’t an option.

He went on to conduct and work in musical education while he underwent brain surgery, grueling experimental treatments and years of therapy that would have caused most people to give up, according to his Kennedy Center biography.

Instead, his career flourished. Then Fleisher baffled the experts and returned to Carnegie Hall at 67 to wide acclaim for his first two-handed concert in nearly four decades. Cellist Yo-Yo Ma salutes him tonight.

To a greater or lesser degree, all the recipients share part of Fleisher’s don’t-tell-me-I-can’t-do-it spirit and have leaped hurdles to get where they are.

TBS rolls out its annual “Funniest Commercials of the Year” at 9.

Tom Dorsey’s column runs Monday through Saturday. Call him at (502) 582-4474 or e-mail him at tdorsey@courier-journal.com.

Online: Ask Tom a question at courier-journal.com/tom