Thursday, November 25, 2010

Thanksgiving Quotes for your Celebration

Here are some wonderful Thanksgiving quotes that show you how to count your blessings. How often do we remember to express our gratitude to our friends, family, and God? If you wish to express your deepest gratitude, these thanksgiving quotes will be helpful.

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Henry Van Dyke 
Gratitude is the inward feeling of kindness received. Thankfulness is the natural impulse to express that feeling. Thanksgiving is the following of that impulse.

Johannes A. Gaertner
To speak gratitude is courteous and pleasant, to enact gratitude is generous and noble, but to live gratitude is to touch Heaven.

William Law
Would you know who is the greatest saint in the world: It is not he who prays most or fasts most, it is not he who gives most alms or is most eminent for temperance, chastity or justice; but it is he who is always thankful to God, who wills everything that God wills, who receives everything as an instance of God's goodness and has a heart always ready to praise God for it.

Melody Beattie
Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.


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Frank A. Clark

If a fellow isn't thankful for what he's got, he isn't likely to be thankful for what he's going to get.

Fred De Witt Van Amburgh
None is more impoverished than the one who has no gratitude. Gratitude is a currency that we can mint for ourselves, and spend without fear of bankruptcy.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy
As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.

Estonian Proverb
Who does not thank for little will not thank for much.

Ethel Watts Mumford
God gave us our relatives; thank God we can choose our friends.

H. U. Westermayer
The Pilgrims made seven times more graves than huts. No Americans have been more impoverished than these who, nevertheless, set aside a day of thanksgiving.


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Meister Eckhart
If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, 'thank you,' that would suffice.

Galatians 6:9
Do not get tired of doing what is good. Don't get discouraged and give up, for we will reap a harvest of blessing at the appropriate time.

Thomas Aquinas
It would seem that the ingratitude, whereby a subsequent sin causes the return of sins previously forgiven, is a special sin. For, the giving of thanks belongs to counter passion, which is a necessary condition of justice. But justice is a special virtue. Therefore this ingratitude is a special sin. Thanksgiving is a special virtue. But ingratitude is opposed to thanksgiving. Therefore ingratitude is a special sin.

Albert Barnes
We can always find something to be thankful for, and there may be reasons why we ought to be thankful for even those dispensations which appear dark and frowning.

Henry Ward Beecher
The unthankful heart... discovers no mercies; but let the thankful heart sweep through the day and, as the magnet finds the iron, so it will find, in every hour, some heavenly blessings!

William Faulkner
Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.

George Herbert
Thou that has given so much to me,
Give one thing more -- a grateful heart;
Not thankful when it pleases me,
As if Thy blessings had spare days;
But such a heart, whose pulse may be
Thy praise.

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J.A. Shedd
He who thanks but with the lips
Thanks but in part;
The full, the true Thanksgiving
Comes from the heart.

Edward Sandford Martin
Thanksgiving Day comes, by statute, once a year; to the honest man it comes as frequently as the heart of gratitude will allow.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
For flowers that bloom about our feet;
For tender grass, so fresh, so sweet;
For song of bird, and hum of bee;
For all things fair we hear or see,
Father in heaven, we thank Thee!

Henry Ward Beecher
The unthankful heart... discovers no mercies; but let the thankful heart sweep through the day and, as the magnet finds the iron, so it will find, in every hour, some heavenly blessings!

Henry Jacobsen
Praise God even when you don’t understand what He is doing.

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Gerald Good
"If you want to turn your life around, try thankfulness. It will change your life mightily."

Robert Burns
Some hae meat and canna eat, -
And some wad eat that want it;
But we hae meat, and we can eat,
Sae let the Lord be thankit.

O. Henry
There is one day that is ours.  There is one day when all we Americans who are not self-made go back to the old home to eat saleratus biscuits and marvel how much nearer to the porch the old pump looks than it used to.  Thanksgiving Day is the one day that is purely American.

Ellen Orleans
I have strong doubts that the first Thanksgiving even remotely resembled the "history" I was told in second grade.  But considering that (when it comes to holidays) mainstream America's traditions tend to be over-eating, shopping, or getting drunk, I suppose it's a miracle that the concept of giving thanks even surfaces at all.

Jon Stewart 
I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then I killed them and took their land. 


Sources and Additional Information:

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

National UnFriend Day: Clean your Facebook Account

"Remember five years ago when no one had Facebook and you didn't know what the guy you took high school biology with was having for lunch?" Jimmy Kimmel asked the audience on his show last night. "Remember how that was fine? Let's go back to that."

If you didn't watch "Jimmy Kimmel Live" November 11, you might think Kimmel started a campaign to end Facebook, but he's not. Instead, he announced a new national holiday called "National Unfriend Day," where he encourages you to "cut out some of the friend fat in your life" on Facebook and otherwise.

Today, November 17, Kimmel wants you to look at all of your Facebook friends and decide: who is really your friend? A friend, as he says, is not someone who "asks what 'Harry Potter' character you are."

See two Video Presentations (watch one after another as they are logically connected):



On his show yesterday evening, Kimmel celebrated the arrival of National Unfriend Day with its very own anthem sung by country artists Brad Paisley and Darius Rucker.

To all the friends I've un'ed before
Who sent me quizzes about Jersey Shore
You made my life a hell
With your stupid LOL
To all the friends I've un'ed before
To all the guys from grammar school
Posting shirtless pictures by their pool
Your fat and sweaty back
Really makes me want to yak
To all the friends I've un'ed before
Our time on earth goes by so quickly
We have to make each moment great
So I cannot waste one more minute
Reading your dumb status update

Kimmel may have a point, but this rather funny joke of a holiday seems to be more a late night comedy sketch than an event manufactured out of real concern for the status of friendship.

Still, National UnFriend Day is good natured -- at least for those not being unfriended -- and you might even consider taking the day to cut some friend fat of our own.

Facebook had no immediate comment on how the festivities were being marked at company headquarters. Needless to say, Zuckerberg is not likely to be adding Kimmel to his friends list anytime soon.

Sources and Additional Information:

Friday, November 5, 2010

Black Friday Ads – Get Ready for Shopping Season

One of the most reliable signs of the coming Big Shopping Season is the Black Friday is getting back to the top of the Google Searches. The slow but steady economy recovery promises the potential good sales results for the vendors, and that is escalating the heat of the season preparation.

Black Black is the Friday after Thanksgiving, and it's one of the major shopping days of the year in the United States -falling anywhere between November 23 and 29. In 2010, it is November 26. While it's not recognized as an official US holiday, many employees have the day off -except those working in retail.


The term “Black Friday” was coined in the 1960s to mark the kickoff to the Christmas shopping season. “Black” refers to stores moving from the “red” to the “black,” back when accounting records were kept by hand, and red ink indicated a loss, and black a profit. Ever since the start of the modern Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1924, the Friday after Thanksgiving has been known as the unofficial start to a bustling holiday shopping season.


So, this year the word is already out quite early: Black Friday sales ads have been leaked to websites and news outlets throughout the country. Before you give too much credit to the sleuthing skills of the websites that post these early deals, consider this: Many retailers leak their sales early, on purpose. Sears, for example, started offering its Black Friday deals on Fridays and Saturdays starting at the end of October, and scored a lot of free publicity as a result. (The company also ran television ads promoting its early start on the shopping holiday.)

Early leaks are a relatively new strategy says Ellen Davis, vice president at the National Retail Federation, and even now, retailers still want to control buzz about their discounts as much as possible. "They don't want their Black Friday deals to get out too early because then you tip your hand to the competition. If you're offering $9 crockpots, then your competition might offer them for $8," she says.

Sometimes the leaks are unauthorized. "Retailers found that the circulars were leaked by a vendor who might have been printing them, or someone inside the company who didn't have permission to do so," says Davis.

Early previews that aren't endorsed can be frustrating for retailers, she says, because they might change their mind about sales as the date gets closer, or their promotions might vary by location. That's one reason many stores keep their biggest discounts under wraps until the day of the sale.
And not every store wants their sales leaked early. Wal-Mart, for example, is notorious for keeping its deals private and even issuing warnings to any websites that post information.

"One of the tactical things they can do to get more attention for their own sales is to let it out really quickly, or pull a Wal-Mart and try to keep it as under wraps as they can until a few days before," says Brad Wilson, publisher of Brad's Deals. He says he usually gets early information about sales from companies themselves. Sometimes, employees from the companies pretend to be average consumers who have discovered sale information in the hopes of promoting it on his site, he says.
Along with the early leaks, many companies are also offering earlier-than-usual sales themselves. In addition to Sears, Amazon, Target, and Toys 'R Us are getting a head start on Black Friday by discounting their sale items weeks ahead of Thanksgiving.

For shoppers, though, part of the secret to mastering Black Friday sales is to ignore a lot of the early hype. The National Retail Federation's Davis says consumers shouldn't put too much trust into third-party websites that sometimes post incorrect information. The best source is retailers' websites, she says.


All Black Friday information will be released by Monday or Tuesday of Thanksgiving week, says Dan de Grandpre, founder of DealNews.com. "There are a lot of rumors ahead of time, but they're not always accurate," he says. If you see details of a leaked ad online, it might be an early draft of sales that could change.

PriceGrabber.com's president Laura Conrad recommends following the Twitter feeds of your favorite retailers so you can be first to receive their deal announcements. The Shopping Blogwebsite also runs a popular Black Friday Twitter feed (@BlackFriday).

To nab the best deals, you'll probably need to get out of bed early and shop in-person, says Wilson of Brad's Deals. "Ninety-five percent of Black Friday items are available online, but some of the best limited-quantity deals are in-store only," he says.

The list of the Websites where you can find pre-released information on the Black Friday deals:


Sources and Additional Information