Happy New Year…!

When the clock strikes twelve on December 31st, people all over the world cheer and wish each other a very Happy New Year. For some, this event is no more than a change of a calendar. For others, the New Year symbolizes the beginning of a better tomorrow. So, if you look forward to a good year ahead, spread happiness with these wonderful New Year wishes.

Irish toast

In the New Year, may your right hand always be stretched out in friendship, never in want.

Minnie L. Haskins
And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown. And he replied: Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light, and safer than a known way.

Movie: “When Harry Met Sally”, Harry Burns
And I love that you are the last person I want to talk to before I go to sleep at night. And it’s not because I’m lonely, and it’s not because it’s New Year’s Eve. I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.

Edith Lovejoy Pierce
We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called “Opportunity” and its first chapter is New Year’s Day.

Charles Dickens
A merry Christmas to everybody! A happy New Year to the world!

Sydney Smith
Resolve to make at least one person happy every day, and then in ten years you may have made three thousand, six hundred and fifty persons happy, or brightened a small town by your contribution to the fund of general enjoyment.

Anonymous
Your Merry Christmas may depend on what others do for you. But your Happy New Year depends on what you do for others.

William Makepeace Thackeray
Certain corpuscles, denominated Christmas Books, with the ostensible intention of swelling the tide of exhilaration, or other expansive emotions, incident upon the exodus of the old and the inauguration of the New Year.

Aisha Elderwyn
Every new year people make resolutions to change aspects of themselves they believe are negative. A majority of people revert back to how they were before and feel like failures. This year I challenge you to a new resolution. I challenge you to just be yourself.

F. M. Knowles, A Cheerful Year Book
He who breaks a resolution is a weakling; He who makes one is a fool.

G. K. Chesterton
The object of a new year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul.

John Greenleaf Whittier
We meet today
To thank Thee for the era done,
And Thee for the opening one

T. S. Eliot
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language and next year’s words await another voice. And to make an end is to make a beginning.

Emily Miller
Then sing, young hearts that are full of cheer,
With never a thought of sorrow;
The old goes out, but the glad young year
Comes merrily in tomorrow

Martin Luther
Glory to God in highest heaven,
Who unto man His Son hath given;
While angels sing with tender mirth,
A glad new year to all the earth

Walter Scott
Each age has deemed the new born year
The fittest time for festal cheer

Benjamin Franklin
Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each New Year find you a better man.

Edgar A. Guest
A happy New Year! Grant that I
May bring no tear to any eye
When this New Year in time shall end
Let it be said I’ve played the friend,
Have lived and loved and labored here,
And made of it a happy year.

William Arthur Ward
This bright new year is given me
To live each day with zest
To daily grow and try to be
My highest and my best!

Ella Wheeler Wilcox
What can be said in New Year rhymes,
That’s not been said a thousand times?
The new years come, the old years go,
We know we dream, we dream we know.
We rise up laughing with the light,
We lie down weeping with the night.
We hug the world until it stings,
We curse it then and sigh for wings.
We live, we love, we woo, we wed,
We wreathe our prides, we sheet our dead.
We laugh, we weep, we hope, we fear,
And that’s the burden of a year.

Charles Lamb
Of all sound of all bells, the most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the Old Year.

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Merry Christmas

I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round, as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.  ~Charles Dickens

Christmas is the gentlest, loveliest festival of the revolving year – and yet, for all that, when it speaks, its voice has strong authority.  ~W.J. Cameron

The best of all gifts around any Christmas tree:  the presence of a happy family all wrapped up in each other.  ~Burton Hillis

One of the most glorious messes in the world is the mess created in the living room on Christmas day.  Don’t clean it up too quickly.  ~Andy Rooney

Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days; that can recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth; that can transport the sailor and the traveller, thousands of miles away, back to his own fire-side and his quiet home!  ~Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, 1836

There has been only one Christmas – the rest are anniversaries.  ~W.J. Cameron

• ‘Twas Christmas broach’d the mightiest ale;
• ‘Twas Christmas told the merriest tale;
• A Christmas gambol oft could cheer
• The poor man’s heart through half the year.
  ~Walter Scott

 

• Christmas is a necessity.  There has to be at least one day of the year to remind us that we’re here for something else besides ourselves.  ~Eric Sevareid
• Our hearts grow tender with childhood memories and love of kindred, and we are better throughout the year for having, in spirit, become a child again at Christmas-time.  ~Laura Ingalls Wilder
• I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.  ~Charles Dickens
• Never worry about the size of your Christmas tree.  In the eyes of children, they are all 30 feet tall.  ~Larry Wilde, The Merry Book of Christmas
• Christmas is the season for kindling the fire of hospitality in the hall, the genial flame of charity in the heart.  ~Washington Irving

 

• Gifts of time and love are surely the basic ingredients of a truly merry Christmas.  ~Peg Bracken
• Isn’t it funny that at Christmas something in you gets so lonely for – I don’t know what exactly, but it’s something that you don’t mind so much not having at other times.  ~Kate L. Bosher
• At Christmas, all roads lead home.  ~Marjorie Holmes
• Instead of being a time of unusual behavior, Christmas is perhaps the only time in the year when people can obey their natural impulses and express their true sentiments without feeling self-conscious and, perhaps, foolish.  Christmas, in short, is about the only chance a man has to be himself.  ~Francis C. Farley
• It is Christmas in the heart that puts Christmas in the air.  ~W.T. Ellis

 

• For centuries men have kept an appointment with Christmas.  Christmas means fellowship, feasting, giving and receiving, a time of good cheer, home.  ~W.J. Ronald Tucker
• Even as an adult I find it difficult to sleep on Christmas Eve.  Yuletide excitement is a potent caffeine, no matter your age.  ~Carrie Latet
• Christmas is a time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it.  Deficits are when adults tell the government what they want and their kids pay for it.  ~Richard Lamm
• Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love!  ~Hamilton Wright Mabie
• Love is what’s in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening presents and listen.  ~Author unknown, attributed to a 7-year-old named Bobby

 

• Christmas is forever, not for just one day,
• for loving, sharing, giving, are not to put away
• like bells and lights and tinsel, in some box upon a shelf.
• The good you do for others is good you do yourself…
  ~Norman Wesley Brooks, “Let Every Day Be Christmas,” 1976

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US religious leaders denounce 'anti-Muslim frenzy'

Source: THE AGE

AMERICAN religious leaders have condemned the plans of a small evangelical Christian church in Florida to burn copies of the Koran on Saturday’s ninth anniversary of the September 11 terror attacks.

The leaders also denounced what they said was a gathering ”anti-Muslim frenzy” in America, describing recent protests against the building of a mosque near Ground Zero in New York as the result of ”misinformation and outright bigotry” against American Muslims.

The interfaith group of evangelical, Catholic, Jewish and Muslim leaders meeting in Washington condemned the call by Pastor Terry Jones of the Dove World Outreach Centre in Gainesville to burn copies of the Muslim holy book to ”expose Islam” as a ”violent and oppressive religion”.

The leaders said the plan was a violation of American values.

”This is not the America that we all have grown to love and care about,” said Rabbi Steve Gutow of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. ”We have to stand up for our Muslim brothers and sisters and say, ‘This is not OK’.”

Pastor Jones’s plans were also condemned by the White House and by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who described them as a disrespectful and disgraceful act. The US commander in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus, warned earlier that the act would endanger the lives of US troops overseas, claims supported by White House press spokesman Robert Gibbs: ”Obviously any type of activity like that, that puts our troops in harm’s way, would be a concern to this administration.”

The 58-year-old preacher, whose congregation numbers about 30, said he and church members planned to burn about 200 copies of the Koran to send a message to al-Qaeda, the group that carried out the terror attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon that killed almost 3000 people.

”That led us to ‘International Burn a Koran Day’ to honour those who were murdered at that time,” said Pastor Jones. ”And to put a real clear message out to Islam that we will not tolerate, we do not want them trying to push their agenda on us, in other words, Sharia law.”

Later, he qualified his remarks, saying they were not directed towards moderate Muslims. ”We are not hateful toward Muslims. We are not aiming this at Muslims, we are aiming this at Sharia.”

Pastor Jones was dismissed as a fringe figure by locals who regretted his growing worldwide notoriety. ”He represents only 30 people in this town,” said Larry Reimer, one local pastor trying to counter Pastor Jones’s message. ”It needs to get out somehow to the rest of the world that this isn’t the face of Christianity.”

Pastor Jones has previously called for a ban on new mosques being built in America and a stop to the immigration of Muslims. He has also campaigned against a local mayor who is gay, erecting signs in the church grounds that read: ”No homo mayor at city hall.”

The pastor has said that church members carry guns because of threats the church has received.

The Dove World Outreach Centre is not linked to any particular denomination, but follows a Pentecostal tradition.

While the tiny church’s actions are testing the bounds of religious tolerance, authorities are powerless to stop the protest because the first amendment of the US constitution guarantees freedom of speech.

Fire officials are believed to have denied the church a fire permit for Saturday.

The planned burning has triggered emotions across the world, fuelling protests in Muslim nations and calls for restraint from Christians.

The Vatican newspaper yesterday published an article in which Catholic bishops criticised Pastor Jones’s plan. ”No one should burn the Koran,” Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano said in a commentary.

The leaders meeting in Washington said they were appalled at ”such disrespect for a sacred text that for centuries has shaped many of the great cultures of our world”.

Pastor Jones has resisted calls to abandon his protest, although yesterday evening he indicated he might be willing to reconsider.