Mothers Day is next Sunday May 10th, 2010. Here are some fun facts to surprise your Mothers:

In 1914, the US Congress passed legislation designating the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day.

82.8 million Estimated number of mothers in the United States in 2004.

55% Percentage of 15- to 44-year-olds who are mothers.

81% Percentage of women 40 to 44 years old who are mothers. In 1980, 90 percent of women in that age group were mothers.

Related links

To will find mothers day ecards and free mothers day printable cards at Gotfreecards.com

Anna Jarvis

Top 5 Reasons to use Free Birthday Reminders

Here’s a small sampling of what I had to do today: I took my dog for a walk, worked an 8-hour shift at my job, came home and worked out, paid the electric bill, made a deposit at the bank, and cooked dinner.  That’s just a normal Wednesday, and it’s not over yet.  But I’m not telling you anything you don’t go through yourself, on a daily basis.  Our lives, after all, are usually packed from morning to night.

And usually, everything somehow ends up working out okay.  But if you throw a little monkey wrench in there—a birthday, an unexpected car repair to make, visiting a sick relative—your whole day can get thrown hopelessly off course.  Now, I can’t help you fix your car (I can barely fix my own!), and I can’t do anything for your sick relatives other than offer my best wishes, but there is one thing I can help with: making sure you don’t forget birthdays.

Free birthday reminders are a great way to, well, remind yourself of upcoming birthdays.  Here are the top five reasons why you should use birthday reminders to help you keep track of all those birthdays that have a nasty habit of messing up your busy schedule.

5) They’re Free! You could hire your own personal assistant to let you know when a friend or loved one has a birthday coming up.  And while your own personal assistant might be a little more entertaining that birthday reminders, they cost a heck of a lot more.  Birthday reminders, in fact, are absolutely free

4) Birthday Reminders are Incredibly Easy to set up. How many times do you check your e-mail every day?  Let’s say four or five (not counting checking your inbox at work!).  Even if you check your e-mail five times a day, you’re still spending more time doing that than it takes to set up a birthday reminder.  All you have to do is go to the birthday reminders homepage, type in a little bit of information, and boom!  You’re done!  Back to e-mail!

3) They see the Future. Most of us will probably use our birthday reminders just a couple of weeks or maybe a month in advance.  But if little Billy has a birthday today, you can send yourself a reminder for his next birthday today!  That’s right: a day, a week, or a month in advance, you can set up your birthday reminder to send you an e-mail on whichever date you choose!

2) Options Galore! Not only can you schedule birthday reminders for events occurring far off in the future, but there are plenty of other scheduling options available, to make sure the reminder works exactly how you want it to.  You can, for example, set up a reminder to be sent to you on the day of the event, a week before, or even a month ahead of time.  Also, you can set your reminder to do annual notifications, as well.

1) A Simple Part of a Complicated Life. Like I said above, we all have too much going on in our everyday lives to risk forgetting our loved ones’ birthdays.  Free birthday reminders were created simply because of that fact: because we’re so busy, and any small thing to take away a little of the burden goes a long, long way.

So for these reasons—and many more you’ll discover yourself—try out free birthday reminders for the next birthday on your calendar!

Every holiday has traditions attached to it.  From trick-or-treating on Halloween, to eating a great meal on Thanksgiving, there seems to be a tradition for every special day of the year.  Christmas is only different, in that there are so many traditions associated with it.  One of the most popular Christmas traditions is sending greeting cards.  Like all holiday traditions, though, greeting cards themselves have a long history.

We’ve reached the point in technology where free animated ecards allow us to send and receive high-quality cards without spending any many.  But this innovation is a fairly recent one.  In fact, greeting cards came into being as a result of the shrew business acumen of a British man named Sir Henry Cole—and his entire aim was to get money!

Cole was instrumental, in the 1840s, in helping create what became known as the Penny Post.  With the Penny Post, people could mail as many letters as they wanted, all over the country, for only a penny each.  This cheap alternative to more expensive mailing services was an instant hit.  Cole knew his new system would be successful from the beginning, though, and he was planning, the entire time, to unveil something new to generate more revenue from his Penny Post.  And a few years later, he did: the first official commercial Christmas card.  Costing only a penny each to mail, the initial print run of over two thousand cards sold out within a year!

Later on in the 1800s, a more related precursor to free ecards came about: home-made cards.  Commercial cards were relatively cheap, sure, but many English citizens were so poor they couldn’t even afford to buy the cards themselves; and so they started creating them at home, using everything from old pieces of fabric, to scrap paper.  Still others, who could have afforded to purchase cards, went the home-made route for a different reason: they were protesting what they saw to be the over-commercialization of Christmas.  For many of England’s upper class, making home-made cards was a way to keep Christmas pure.

Chain stores were of course next on the innovation list, and many of those stores we still have around today: those places that take up large chunks of our area shopping malls, and who specialize in selling greeting cards for all occasions.  The early 1990s brought the first greeting card computer software, too: this software allowed users (who purchased it for a high cost, of course) to create professional-grade greeting cards at home, on their own personal computers.

The biggest innovation in the history of greetings is, of course, free ecards.  As simple a process as it is, and always has been, to purchase a card from a store and mail it, it’s even easier to pick out your own favorite free Christmas ecards and send them electronically, instantly.  Best of all, they’re completely free.

Here is a quick update on what we are up to in the GotFreeCards Christmas HQ:

1. Have you checked out our new Free Christmas Ecards?

2. We have started a whole new line of Printable Christmas Photo Cards you can add your photos and send out Christmas cards right from your home.

3. You can also create Free Printable Christmas Cards on your desktop to snail mail it.

But do not forget we keep adding many new Free Printable Birthday Cards. So enjoy our site and leave us your comments.

We at GotFreeCards have many different Diwali cards so here are some quick links to help you navigate easily

• Diwali Ecards to email
• Printable Diwali Cards (Create and Print Cards at home)
• Diwali Blogs

Here’s wishing all our readers happy, safe and prosperous Diwali!

Halloween

A few weeks back we talked about how to Indian Festivals will kick off our busy season. Obviously Christmas and New Year is going to be the play offs. But these days we are working on diwali ecards and Halloween ecards do check them out. Also do not forget free printable Halloween cards here you can find cards to color. This is an awesome project for kids and since they are free you can print out a bunch so that they can distribute  to their classmates. The other fun feature here is that you can even add a class photo and make it even more personal.

Do not forget we have recently added printable photo cards perfect to create birthday invitations right at home. We are also working to add more photo frames that will be halloween themed. So be sure to re-visit us soon or join our newsletter.

My favorite holiday of the entire year is quickly approaching.  I’m not talking about Christmas or Thanksgiving, or any of our more ‘sacred’ holidays, but Halloween, the most frighteningly fun day of the year.  And I’m not alone in my love of Halloween, either: outside of Christmas, Thanksgiving and New Year’s, Halloween is the third most popular holiday in America; and it is the second most popular holiday in the entire world!  But as popular as Halloween is, a lot of people still aren’t fully familiar with its roots.

Depending on your age (mostly), Halloween today is either a time to dress up in costumes and go trick-or-treating; or it’s a time to gather with friends, watch scary movies and throw parties.  Halloween’s more sacred origins, by all accounts, have kind of fallen by the wayside.  Though it’s mostly a secular holiday today, its origins do have spiritual, if not exactly religious, undertones.

All the way back in the 9^th century, Irish Celts put on an annual festival, known as Samhain, to commemorate the end of harvest season.  With all their crops put into storage and resting right on the cusp of winter, the Celts would take inventory of the supplies already harvested, and slaughter livestock for winter storage.  They also believed that on one single day of the year—October 31^st—the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead would dissolve.

The spirits of the dead, the Celts thought, would come through that dissolved boundary, and wreak havoc on the living, most damaging by attacking their crops.  And so in efforts to ward off the spirits, great bonfires were built.  Spirits were supposedly afraid of fire, and it was thought that throwing the bones of recently-slaughtered animals into these fires would make them burn hotter and more brightly.

The custom of wearing costumes comes directly from these festivals, too.  Though costumes today run the gambit from princesses to smiling, friendly ghosts, the costumes worn at Samhain were universally evil-looking ghouls.  Some of the costumes were designed to resemble what the Celts thought evil spirits looked like—the thinking was that evil spirits would see the Celts in their costumes, and move on, thinking the area was already ‘covered.’  Other costumes were designed to be as horrifying as possible, in the hopes that the evil spirits themselves would be scared away.

Trick-or-treating also comes from Ireland, albeit not specifically from the Samhain festivals.  Trick-or-treating likely has its roots in a centuries-old Irish and British custom called ‘souling.’  On Hallowmas, or November 1^st, poor villagers would go door-to-door to the homes of the rich.  The poor folks would offer sacred prayers for the souls of dead family members, and in return for their prayers they were given food.  Over the centuries, of course, souling has merged with Halloween itself, and instead of offering prayers for food, children make light-hearted threats of playing tricks, unless they are given candy.

Though we don’t really afford Halloween the same serious respect as we do other holidays like Christmas, Halloween, like most holidays, has a very sacred and important past.  I hope that knowing a little bit more about where this great holiday has its roots will help you enjoy it, just a little bit more! and why not get into the spirit of things and send send out halloween ecards now.

Today I was out doing a couple of errands at the OSH and Walgreens. And the first thing I saw was the Halloween decorations! Halloween, it is not even Labor Day. But that means they have been working on it since April and here I was thinking we are ahead of the pack working on Halloween Ecards and Printable Halloween Cards. But obviously they had us beat.

So what are we working on at this time?  October is the start of busy season for us. It gets kicked off by the Indian festival of Diwali and obvously culminates with Christmas. And then there are some smaller festivals that require attention in between like Thanksgiving and Durga Puja in India.

So at this time we are working on Durga Puja Ecards, Diwali Ecards and Halloween before we make the big push to Christmas.

Birthday

Set Event Reminders!

Imagine this. You’re on a family vacation. As you sit sipping your favorite cocktail on a gorgeous pool-side deck in your ocean-front hotel, your kids splash in the water park; it’s a beautiful summer day and you think “This is life!” And then you begin humming a tune. It’s your favorite song (although you may sound completely off key). It brings back memories of college days. “Ah, those were the days”, you think.

And that’s when it hits you. Yesterday was your best friend’s birthday. And for the first time in your life, you forgot.

Everybody needs to unwind and forget about the daily grind once in a while. But, there are some things you can’t afford to forget, no matter where you are.

Although a phone call and a belated birthday wish may be all it will take for you to make up, there’s really no excuse to forget someone’s birthday. And a belated wish is well…belated. It’s never the same as wishing someone on their special day.

Well, luckily for you, this is an imaginary situation.

In real life, of course, you would have set the gotfreecards event and birthday reminders. So, the minute you checked your messages, you would have remembered what day it was and promptly called your friend to wish her.

Or, even better, you would already have scheduled birthday ecards to be sent to her on her birthday using our “Send now” or “Send on (birthday) date” feature. So she’ll know that no matter where you are, you still think of her and care enough to wish her.

And you can go back to sipping your heavenly cocktail and soaking in the July sun.

We have a winner for our $100 Giveaway conducted at various blog sites. The winner is Kristy from Toranto she won at the blog http://icefairystreasurechest.blogspot.com/ . The final draw was done at Momfuse.com.

Congrats! Kristy. Hope you have fun. And you can send your friends South of the Border 4th of July Ecards.