What is Most Important this Christmas Season

I am afraid that many of us get so distracted with buying gifts for others and then thinking about what they will buy for us, that we do not take the time to consider what is it that we really and truly want. Nor do we allow ourselves to mull over what is most important to us this Christmas season. Sure, we all like nice presents but the happiness they bring us is very short lived and only surface deep.

Psychiatrists, psychologists and psychoanalysts have been asking countless clients and patients “What is most important this Christmas season” over a span of many years and the conclusion is always the same. What is most important at our gut level during the Christmas season is HAPPINESS, JOY, LOVE, FUN, PEACE, SERENITY, ACCEPTANCE, CONTENTMENT, FRIENDSHIP and COMPANIONSHIP as well as GOOD HEALTH. These are the intangible emotion words that drive us, these are the intangible emotion words that we crave and these are the intangible emotion words that we need.

It is such a paradox. We spend hours upon hours distressing over what to buy for whom and where to buy it, we fight traffic on the streets and crowds in shopping malls and then we wrap presents which are only mild distractions from what we honestly want. And the things that we honestly want do not ever require spending money, they cannot be gift wrapped even if we wanted to wrap them and there are no ribbons big enough to go around them. They are simple, they are basic and they are essentially crucial.

For a most memorable Christmas and the jolliest season, let us all concentrate more on the things that we all honestly want by fulfilling our intangible emotional words and less on the frills of the tangible. I realize that it may not be easy because there will be a few hurdles that we will have to overcome, but it is by no means impossible:

* Minimize Duty, Responsibility and Obligation. We may have lists upon long lists of things that we must do, should do and have to do, but forget to create lists of what we truly want to do. We cannot derive joy from doing things out of mere obligation.

* Give from Your Heart Not from Your Pocketbook. If you are going to give someone a gift, make it special not expensive.

* Give Yourself Credit for the Good You Have Done. It is honorable to give to worthwhile causes but do not beat yourself up if you cannot give to them all.

* Avoid Procrastinating. Do yourself a favor by making your Christmas plans way in advance and by starting to shop before the rest of humanity.

* If You Intend to Eat, Allow Yourself to Enjoy It. There is no point in eating if you are then going to feel guilty about it. It’s Christmas; relax and enjoy it.

* You and Yours Spouse Must Agree With Whose Family to Spend Christmas. To avoid family feuds and resentments, you and your spouse must be in total agreement about whether to spend Christmas with her family or with his, and such agreements must be established way in advance.

* Do Not Be Pressured to Drink More Than You Want To. Waking up with a hangover does not make good memories. If you are going to drink alcoholic beverages, do so only moderately and never drive after drinking.

* Do Not Be Afraid or Shy About Delegating. If you are the one who is hosting the Christmas dinner, encourage others to help you with the shopping, the preparations, the serving and the cleanup. You do not want to spend your Christmas being too tire and stressed to enjoy it.

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Christmas Celebrations Around the World

Christmas is an internationally celebrated holiday around the world and for some it is the holiest day of the year — it is a day on which Christians of all denominations rejoice in the birth of their Lord. It may or may not come as a surprise to you to discover that Christmas is celebrated in a variety of ways in different parts of the world and in different cultures. Let us, then, take a brief peek at a Christmas festivities in a few countries:

* Christmas in the Holy Land.

The Holy Land is where Jesus was born and where he spent his entire life on earth as a mortal being. Many thousands of Christians make their annual pilgrimage to the Holy Land to not only celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ but to also walk on the ground where He had walked over two thousand years ago.

Jesus is said to have been born in Bethlehem and the Church of the Nativity had been erected on the alleged site of his birth. In celebration of Christmas, the Church is decorated with flags from around the world and it gets crowded with locals and visitors who come to witness the spectacular annual Christmas Eve parade that is led by riders on Arabian horses, followed by one cross-bearing rider on a black steed and behind him come churchmen and government officials. The procession enters the church and an antiquated effigy of the Holy Child is placed in the grotto that is located down steep winding stairs where a fourteen-point silver star marks the exact spot where Jesus was born.

Christmas Eve is celebrated by three distinct groups in the Holy Land’s Bethlehem whose Christians paint crosses over their doors and display homemade manger scene and where a star is posted atop a tall pole in the city’s square. The Church of the Nativity is buzzing with different languages as Protestants and Catholics hold their services while elsewhere in the church the Greek Orthodox, the Egyptian Coptic and the Syrians hold their services while in yet another part of the church the Armenians have their services. Regardless of their persuasion, they are all served lunch comprised of turkey meat spiced with pepper, cinnamon and nutmeg and stuffed with rice, pine nuts and almonds.

The Protestants walk around caroling, the Catholic priests walk from home to home to bless the water from which every member of each family takes a sip, and the Greek Orthodox dip a cross in blessing of the water that people carry home with them to sip before eating anything.

* Christmas in Argentina.

Christmas in Argentina is celebrated on December 24 and it involves entire families going to services and then returning to homes decorated with red and white garlands and Father Christmas images. They eat hardy, they dance joyously and watch firework shows with excitement.

* Christmas in China.

Christian children in China decorate trees, called Trees of Light, with colorful paper ornaments shaped into flowers, chains, lanterns and stocking which they hope Christmas Old-Man (Dun Che Lao Ren) will fill with gifts.

Children seem to be the main focus of Christmas celebrations in China as they are treated to their favorite foods, get new clothes and toys and are permitted to stay up to watch late-night fireworks.

* Christmas in Greenland.

Christmas trees in Greenland are decorated with lighted candles and bright ornaments and there is must dancing, playing games, caroling, drinking coffee and eating cakes. Gifts which are distributed are brightly wrapped and may typically consist of a pair of tusks or a sealskin mitt. Everyone is treated to Mattak (a piece of whale skin with a strip of blubber) to be swallowed because chewing it is difficult. They also serve Kiviak which is the raw flesh of an auk that has been buried in sealskin for several months until it reached an advanced stage of decomposition.

* Christmas in Iraq.

Christmas Eve is celebrated in courtyards of Christian Iraqi families. One child reads the story of the Nativity while the rest of the family holds up lighted candles. A bonfire is then lit and psalms are sung. When the bonfire is reduced to ash, it is customary for everyone to jump over it three times and make a wish.

Similar bonfires are built in church courtyards on Christmas Day and the men chant hymns. Processions led by bishops take place in Iraqi Christian communities. The bishops carry images of baby Jesus prone on scarlet cushions and the services end with the bishops touching one congregant with a blessing, this congregant touches another congregant with the same blessing and so on until everyone had been touched and blessed.

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What is Christmas and How Did It Get Its Name

Whether you view Christmas as a holiday and time for vacating or as a holy day of worship, Christmas is in fact a mixture of various cultures from around the world which has been accumulating for hundreds of years. Turkey dinners with cranberry sauce, decorated evergreen trees and the colorfully wrapped gifts at their bases, Christmas cards and their heartfelt greetings, jolly old Santa Claus and his reindeer, yule logs and chestnuts roasting on open fires, mistletoes and granted kisses, chiming bells and carols are all many aspects of Christmas which we have come to consider as inherently inseparable and at the heart of December 25, all came in bits and pieces from different peoples.

Today’s Christmas is a celebration of Christ’s birthday but in reality, no one knows when Christ was born and until the early part of the fourth century no one cared. Birthdays were no reason to celebrate or commemorate but deaths were. Theologians, researchers and historians through the ages have attempted to pinpoint the Nativity to a specific date but came up with a profusion of unrelated dates such as January 1, January 6, March 25 and May 20, but none found the slightest evidence that would even remotely point to December 25. May 20 became the most often agreed upon date of the Nativity because the Gospel of Luke maintains that the shepherds who received the news of Christ’s birth were watching their sheep by night and it is known that sheep where watched around the clock only at lambing time which was in the spring.

In an attempt to cast a shadow on an ancient pagan religion, Mithraism, whose December 25 festivities threatened to attract more Christians than the church could afford to lose, clever church elders suggested celebrations of the Nativity on the same day. Although they encountered much opposition from the more conservative sector of the church which claimed that it is sinful to even as much as contemplate observing the birth of Christ “as though He were a King Pharaoh” and not a divine son of God, the renegade fathers ultimately prevailed.

The church thereafter legitimized December 25 as the birth date of Christ and its observance would be characterized in meditative prayer, in giving thanks and in pensive rejoicing — a mass, Christ’s mass. One Christian theologian wrote in his journal in the latter part of the 320s: “We hold this day holy, not like the pagans because of the birth of the sun, but because of Him who made it.”

Thanks to the psychological power of group celebrations, the unification and equalization of ranks and social classes, the solidification and affirmation of collective identity and the reinforcement of a common belief system and its objectives, the celebration of Christ’s mass or Christmas on December 25 took hold in the Western world. However, Christmas did not become permanently rooted until the Roman emperor Constantine was baptized in 337, an event which for the first time united the Roman emperorship with the Christian church and made Christianity the official religion of the state. And when in 354, Bishop Liberius of Rome reiterated the importance of celebrating not only Christ’s death but also His birth; those few who still remained aloof from the church were finally convinced.

The word Christmas stems from the abbreviation of “Christ’s mass” which is a derivative from Middle English Christemasssee and Old English Cristes maesse. The earliest found evidence of this phrase was recorded in 1038 which was also an amalgamated derivative of the Greek Christos and the Latin missa. In the Greek translations of the New Testament, the letter X (chi) is the first letter of Christ. By the mid-16th century, X was used as an acronym for Christ and Xmas became the abbreviate form of Christmas.

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Christmas Cards

We have all become so accustomed to sending and receiving beautifully decorated and eloquently phrased store-bought Christmas cards that we take it for granted that past generations have done the same as will future generations. However, the fact is that sending commercially printed Christmas cards is a relatively recent phenomenon taking us back to 1843 London, England.

Prior to then, people were exchanging Christmas greetings on handwritten notes that were either delivered in person or they were sent via postal services. Eventually, the postal services became the favorite means by which to dispatch Christmas greetings and its popularity grew to burdensome proportions. In 1822, the Superintendent of Mails in Washington D.C. requested that sixteen more postmen be hired during the holiday season and, fearing that the overload will create an unmanageable bottleneck, he further petitioned Congress to limit the exchange of cards by post. To his chagrin, not only did Congress ignore his petition, but the postal burden worsened far beyond his worst fears.

The first Christmas card that was intended for commercial sale was created by John Calcott Horsley in the summer of 1843. Horsley was a well known and respected artist and illustrator in London who was commissioned by Sir Henry Cole, a wealthy British businessman, to design a Christmas card that he could proudly send to his family, friends and business associates. Being the prominent innovator who modernized the British postal system, managed the construction of the Albert Hall, organized the Great Exhibition of 1851 and oversaw the opening ceremony of the Victoria and Albert Museum; Sir Henry Cole also ran an art shop on Bond Street that specialized in decorative objects for the home and that is where he sold the first commercial Christmas cards.

The first commercially Christmas card portrayed two good deeds — feeding the hungry and clothing the naked — on each side panel. Its centerpiece depicted a large celebration of adults and children with an abundance of food and drink. This depiction, by the way, received must criticism from the ardent British Temperance Movement. The inscription of this first Christmas card read: “Merry Christmas and a happy New Year to you.” At the time, “merry” meant “blessed” as in “merry old England.”

One thousand cards were printed of that first Christmas card designed by John Calcott Horsley for Sir Henry Cole and twelve of these still exist today in private collections. And, surprisingly or not, this card proved to be a trendsetter of a lasting kind because printed cards very soon became hot commodities throughout England and soon after that in Germany.

It took another thirty years for commercially designed and printed Christmas cards to gain popularity in America and it began in 1875 when Louis Prang, a German born lithographer in Boston, started designing and publishing Christmas cards. Thus, Louis Prang is considered to be the “father of the American Christmas card.” However, Prang’s Christmas cards were high quality and therefore very costly and they depicted non-Christmas-like scenes such as floral arrangements of roses, daisies, gardenias, geraniums and apple blossoms which failed to generate enough sales and he was forced out of business in 1890. The American public finally bought into the idea of commercially produced Christmas cards but they preferred the cheap penny Christmas postcards which were imported from Germany and these remained in high demand until the end of World War I, when America established its own greeting card industry.

Today’s Christmas card industry is booming with annual revenues of billions of dollars and the cards come in myriads of styles, sizes and costs — there are Christmas cards to suite anyone’s taste. The traditional greeting that said “wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year” has evolved into countless variations on this greeting and many contemporary Christmas cards express more sentiment, more religious intonations that may include biblical verses, more humor or more poetry. To make selection of Christmas cards easier and more recipient-appropriate, one can find Christmas cards especially designed for moms, dads, sisters, brothers, bosses, lovers, friends, and so on and on and on.

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Audio Editing in Teleseminars: Putting the Finishing Touches on Your Product

It's quite common for teleseminar hosts to repackage their teleseminars as audio files. This is often done to allow attendees a means to review the seminar on their own or as a means to earn an income from a finished product. However, teleseminar sessions – particularly those which are interactive – are very rarely perfect. Audio quality, for one, isn't always ideal. So how do you perform audio editing in teleseminars in order to produce a good recording? Here are ways how:

Use a reliable recording device or application

Even if you will be doing the teleseminar by your lonesome, it is still quite possible for you to perform the editing afterward, provided you have a recording of the presentation.

There are plenty of excellent recording devices and applications you can use. The simplest is probably by recording yourself using a microphone and your computer. This is if you intend to package the teleseminar with only your voice appearing on it. Simply save the audio file on your computer and edit it from there using a media player application.

You can also use software that is capable of recording the teleconferencing session in full. This means that you will have a record of the whole discussion, with your voice and those of your participants in it.

Some examples of application you can use for audio editing are Audacity, AudioAcrobat and Wimpy MP3 Player. These applications allow you to record your teleseminar and then make finishing touches later. Some may even offer a podcasting feature, so check if this option is available.

Use a third party service

If you want all the trouble off your hands, hire a professional third party service to do all the work for you. Other than the company servicing your teleconference bridge line, you might also find other providers that not only record your teleseminar but will also edit the audio.

The advantage here is that you get professional-level service for your needs so you can be confident that your teleseminar content is in good hands. Furthermore, many of these providers even offer extras such as producing your edited teleseminar audio as CDs or DVDs, in formats of your choice. If you prefer, you can also take advantage of their transcription service, often inclusive of their fees.

What part of the audio do you edit?

There are plenty of stuff in the master recording of your teleseminar that you might want to edit out of the finished copy. Some of these include:

- Background noise. Static and ambient noise is often present in teleseminars. The location from which you speak, for example, may contribute to the noise particularly if the location is not private enough or doesn’t afford sufficient protection from external noise. Noise coming from the environment of your callers will also affect the quality of the audio of your teleseminar.

- Irrelevant talk. Some parts of the discussion that occur during a teleseminar may not be necessary for the final recording. Chit chats, a few seconds of gossip, an inappropriate remark, etc. will have to be edited out.

- Pauses from the host or callers. Longer-than-usual pauses, 'uhs' and 'ums' have to be edited out of your teleseminar audio. If you stuttered, coughed or paused too many times, the final effect if the audio is unedited will be far from flattering, so you will have to tweak the audio to produce a recording of the session that has a better quality.

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Part 6 – Offpage Search Engine Optimization II

In the last article, we talked about how getting high quality links from authoritative websites in your field can boost your search engine rankings. This time, we’re going to explore further into linking strategies, and how to determine and obtain “high quality” links. We’re also going to talk briefly about Google’s PageRank.

First, let’s examine a regular link. It’s a piece of text (or image, but we’re going for text) that links to your blog, and some of the factors that matter are
1) The address which it links to
2) The text of the link
3) The PageRank of the page on which the link resides

Let’s analyze this information one by one. First, you’d naturally want the link to link to your blog, but to which page of your blog? To an individual post or to your blog’s home page? Since your blog is a constantly updated website, it is always wise to accumulate all the links to point to your main page instead if individual posts because they tend to be very time-sensitive.

The text of the link also affects your rankings for a certain keyword. Let’s say your blog is about technological gadgets and another site has a link that says “Barbie dolls” and links to your blog. Doesn’t make much sense, right? If a lot of links that link to your site contain the terms “technological” or “gadget”, it will greatly boost your rankings for those keywords. Hence, it’s essential to put some thoughts when requesting links from other webmasters as you want them to link to your blog with appropriate keywords.

Now, about Google’s PageRank. It’s basically a scale set by Google to measure the popularity of websites. You can read more about it on http://www.google.com/technology/. What is interesting is that the higher the PageRank of a certain website, the more frequent Google’s robots will visit the website to index it. Of course, the PageRank of a page will also help it to rank higher in Google’s search engine results. In short, having a high PageRank will bring you many benefits SEO-wise.

Your blog will start with no PageRank (which is different to PageRank 0) because Google has not yet indexed your blog. Once Google’s robots find your blog through links on other sites, your blog will show a PageRank of 0 and depending on the PageRank of the referring page, your blog’s PageRank will also rise eventually.

Getting high-quality links to your blog will help direct targetted visitors who are interested in your niche to your blog, enable search engines to find and index your blog and ultimately rank higher in

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Part 5 – Offpage Search Engine Optimization

We’ve already optimized our blog to rank well for search results of certain keywords that we’re targetting, but here comes the sad news – it affects your ranking in only very minor ways. However, don’t skip this step as every little bit helps when you’re competing for search engine rankings!

Now, we’re moving on to offpage search engine optimization. That is, factors that are not on your blog but affect your search engine rankings very greatly. There are a lot of offpage factors, but we shall study them one by one. The first and most obvious one is the number of links to your blog.

As a general rule of thumb, the more links to your blog, the more the search engines think you are an authority in that particular niche and hence the higher they rank you. However, take care to observe the quality of the links. For example, a thousand links from totally irrelevant sites like online dating sites would not help at all because your blog is a technological product blog. In contrast, a single link from a highly authoritative site about technological gadgets will get the search engines crawling about your blog like the Feds storming a crack den…

Anyway, the most cost effective way of getting high quality links from authoritative sites is simply to ask for it. If your blog contains high quality content that is original and will provide valuable information to the site’s readers, chances are the webmaster(s) will link to your blog or even write about you!

Let’s talk about how we should ask these webmasters of authority to link to your blog. We’re discussing this based on the presumption that your blog is really content rich and offer high quality information to anyone in your niche or topic of discussion. The most viable option would be to send an email directly to the webmaster.

First, let’s look for the top sites in your niche. Simply search the major search engines for the term that you’re targetting. In this case, let’s search for “technological gadgets”. The first few results, www.t3.co.uk and www.acarplace.com/brands/gm/gadgets.html are commercial sites, so don’t bother asking. We’re looking for community-based sites and other blogs that are more accessible to a complete newcomer like you. Seems like www.gizmodo.com would be a good option!

So, compose an email to the webmaster of www.gizmodo.com (whose email address you shall find on the site). They even have their AIM contact there, so it’s also a good choice if you use AOL Instant Messenger. Start by stating how you came across their site (i.e. “looking for gadget information”, NOT “looking for link partners!”) and how you think their site provides valuable info. Basically, try to say something really good about their site honestly.

Then, suggest that so-and-so content on your own blog will be a nice complement to their site’s content and vice versa. Put a link on your blog to their site and ask subtly if they might be able to do the same to weld a mutually beneficial relationship between the site and your blog.

Along the way, you might find people who won’t even respond to your email, so forget about them and move on. Remove the links from your blog to their site if they have not responded to your email within two weeks, which is a pretty long wait.

Keep doing this for the first 30 search results that pop up, and before long you should have quite a few good sites all linking to you. In the next article, we shall explore further the more advanced offpage factors, and ways to improve them!

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