The beauty of social media is the ability to connect with many great people I wouldn't otherwise be able to, and my connections include many great USA citizens who are celebrating Thanksgiving Day this week.

In the UK the nearest we ever got to a Thanksgiving was when we used to celebrate our Harvest Festival.  When I was a child the Harvest Festival was a big deal at school.  The Harvest Festival was a form of thanksgiving where we celebrated the food we received and gave to those less fortunate of us.  (My mother regularly cleared out her “tins cupboard”, to pack me off to school, with my donation for the school hampers, they usually gave to the elderly and sick).  Now I may simply mix in the wrong circles, but it’s literally years since I heard about the Harvest Festival.

When we were kids, my family were big on manners, and we were automatically taught to say “Thank you.”  It was the done thing, and if we violated this exercise in politeness, we were taken to task with a big frown.

Of course as a child,  I didn't realise the significance of those words and why they are so important.  It took me years to stop being polite with my “Thank you’s” and to mean them with sincerity. Much of my growing awareness stemmed from my life simply not working.  I was tenacious enough to want to discover why.  One of the reasons it wasn’t working had a lot to do with my <em>polite</em> ”Thank you”  and here’s why.  <a href="http://www.peoplediscovery.co.uk/2012/11/21/12-reasons-to-say-thank-you-and-why-the-world-needs-it/">Read More</a>...