Girlfriends, looking for something different to do for your February Girls Night? Try a Lunar New Year Celebration to gather with your girlfriends in the spirit of new beginning, good fortune, and colorful festivity. This girls night is certain to liven up your winter routine!

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Happy Valentine’s Week! Here at GirlfriendCelebrations, we love Valentine’s Day, and we encourage celebrating it with your girlfriends. Even if there’s no romance in your life right now, you still have plenty to appreciate and celebrate – you have friends! We know one woman who sends Valentine cards to all her friends instead of Christmas cards. It’s her way of showing appreciation from the heart. In that spirit, here’s a short roundup of ideas to get YOU thinking of ways to brighten your February with Valentine-themed girls nights. Watch for new posts this week with even more creative ideas for February festivities.

“I Enjoy Being a Girl” Chinese New Year and Valentine’s Party – Our girlfriend Jen Luby at Second City Soiree has done it again! This time she’s got some great entertaining tips centered around Chinese New Year, which falls on February 14 this year, and usually occurs somewhere around Valentine’s Day. Here’s how she came up with the theme:

“I Enjoy Being a Girl” is a song from Flower Drum Song, a Rogers & Hammerstein musical which relates the tale of Chinese immigrants in San Francisco during the 1950s.  The are various opinions on the musical, and it’s not among R&H’s better-known works.  It did enjoy a brief spike of renewed interest when Sarah Jessica Parker performed “I Enjoy Being a Girl” in a 2004 Gap commercial.

See the rest of her post HERE. Read the rest of this entry »

Loneliness may be the most dangerous epidemic women face, according to this guest post by Shasta Nelson, founder of GirlFriendCircles.com, a web-based service that matches its members with potential girlfriends offline, in real life. Lucky for us, she has some concrete ideas on how to beat loneliness and make new friends in this new year. Shasta also puts her money where her mouth is: She’s giving away a six-month GirlFriendCircles membership to one lucky GirlfriendCelebrations reader! In addition, she is offering YOU discounts on membership and other GirlFriendCircles events. See below for all the details.

By Shasta Nelson
While many of us have stood in line for the flu shot, bought abundant amounts of antibacterial hand soap and increased our daily intake of immune boosting vitamins, research published last month suggests there’s something besides Swine Flu and the common cold that we need to protect ourselves from  – loneliness. And it’s apparently equally, if not more, contagious as run-of-the-mill germs.

The Impact of Loneliness

With the holidays over and social calendars cleared, January becomes one of the loneliest months of the year. A study published in December’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology shows that loneliness not only affects our personal health and well-being and the way we treat others, but it also increases the sense of loneliness in our friends, family and neighbors. It can spread from person to person, up to three degrees of separation.

Protect Yourself

Here are three ways to help build your relational immune system this New Year:
Get a Check-Up: Determine your current relational health by evaluating your circle of friends. What friends do you have and what friends are you still hoping to find? Do you have enough local friends? Do you have the women surrounding you that help you feel rooted and supported right where you are?
Is your circle broad enough to accommodate different areas of your life? What interests or types of friends would enhance your life? Are you someone who connects with everyone but needs to pull a few people closer to you in more meaningful ways? Or do you tend to only have a few in your life so that when one of them moves or life changes that you find yourself not knowing who else to call?

Identify Long-Term Health: Write out what it looks and feels like to have a close circle of friends in your life. This step is crucial, but often skipped. While we all know you can’t go to the gym once and all of a sudden reach your health goals, the same is true for our relationships. Hold that truth with a willingness to not give up after a few scheduled events or attempts to reach out. This is one of the most significant health goals of your life and it very well may take three to six months before you can create a sense of belonging and connectedness.

Schedule your Steps: Based upon the awareness from your check-up in step one, you should be able to identify action steps that will foster more meaningful friendships in your life. For example, if you already know plenty of people but need to transition a few of them into something more meaningful, there are two primary ways of deepening friendships: more consistency (most of us will need to connect with someone at least twice a month over three months before we feel close) or more topics of sharing, which means broadening the conversations beyond the area that we currently have in common whether it’s work, our kids or a specific project. What can you commit to trying? Or, if you need to meet new potential friends, be open to trying lots of things such as joining sites like GirlFriendCircles.com, participating in a local choir, inviting your neighbors over for drinks or attending more events where your current network can help introduce you to more people.

This January, drag yourself to the gym and try to eat better, but for all the New Year’s Resolutions you may set, few of them will impact your health, physically, emotionally and relationally, more than surrounding yourself with good friends.

Shasta Nelson is a relationship and transition life coach and CEO of GirlfriendCircles.com, an online community that matches women with offline friends.

Exclusive Discounts

GirlfriendCelebrations readers, use this special discount code: “GFCELEB” to save 20% on any of GirlFriendCircles.com upcoming events:

21 Days of Friendship Journey, starts this Sunday, Jan 10 (workbook and coaching calls— participants can be from anywhere) http://newyearjourney.eventbrite.com/

Portland Speed Friending, Tuesday, Jan 12 (http://portlandspeedfriending.eventbrite.com/)

Seattle Speed Friending, Wednesday, Jan 13 (http://seattlespeedfriending.eventbrite.com/)

Or, receive 20% off membership in GirlFriendCircles.com, the only online community to match new friends offline by connecting circles of women in local areas, to expand your circle of friends!

And Now For the Giveaway

GirlFriendCircles has generously offered to give one of our our readers a 6-month membership free! GirlFriend Circles matches members up with a small “Connecting Circle” of local women first, then after that initial meeting, you are free to use its resources to find other friends in your area as well. Please note the cities in which memberships are currently available: San Francisco and Bay Area, Portland, Seattle, Chicago and New York City. You must be able to use the membership in one of these cities to be eligible.

To enter:

1. Simply leave a comment on this post that says why you would like to try the GirlFriend Circles membership.

2. Tweet this contest for an extra entry.

3. Blog about it, linking back to this post, for an extra two entries.

Contest will remain open until 11:59 PM CST on Friday, January 22, 2010. Winner will be chosen at random from all eligible entries. Good luck, girlfriends! Read the rest of this entry »

Another girlfriend year is coming to a close, so we wanted to look back and remember some of our favorite post of 2009. We’ve had some great ones this year! In fact, narrowing the list down to 10 favorites was tough, but we selected 5 party ideas and 5 articles that we thought represented the best of GirlfriendCelebrations this year. Read on and see if you agree, and let us know in the comments. You can also VOTE for your favorite GirlfriendCelebrations party idea of 2009 in our twtpoll in the left-hand column. If you missed any of these great posts, you may want to consider subscribing to our e-newsletter. That way you’ll never miss a minute of the celebration!

Party Ideas

1. Patio Crawl Tina says: “I like this because it’s hip to host at any age. It can be held virtually anywhere from a large subdivision to a small apartment complex. If you wanted to include the opposite sex, it wouldn’t too hard to modify. What a great way to celebrate the fall season! And last but not least…I secretly really, really, really want to host one of these ~ sounds like so much fun.”

2. Welcome-to-Town Cookie Party Tina says: “I love that you can host this for girls of all ages. It’s a unique twist on the old favorite cookie exchange. It’s a fun way to get the “chore” of seeing all your close friends and extended family without traveling from house to house during the time-crunched holiday season.”
3. Karaoke Girls Night Dawn says: “Classic GirlfriendCelebrations: Fun, easy, cheap, and unique. This is a great Japan-themed girls night to warm up a winter night by bringing out your inner diva.” Read the rest of this entry »

For the healthy, the holiday season can be hectic and harried. For the “Breast Cancer Warrior,” it’s all that and more. As a Breast Cancer Warrior  since November 2005, our girlfriend Brooke Jones knows that holiday gift giving can be challenging. After learning that she had become the 5th of 6 women in her family to hear the words: “You have breast cancer” she created a unique website for women, www.BreastCancerWarrior.net, featuring crucial information, expert articles, links to the Internet’s most-respected breast cancer web sites, and…humor. She hopes to reach every girlfriend with knowledge, education and laughter. So listen on as she guides us through gifts worthy of giving to the girlfriends we love.

By Brooke Jones

If there’s a BC Warrior on your holiday list, you might be asking yourself this question: “What do you give to the person whose one wish is to live?” Though the question is deep, the answer is simple: You give YOU. (and no, I’m not talking organ donation, I’m talking ENERGY donation).

Breast Cancer Warriors frequently describe the exhaustion caused by treatment as ‘feeling like somebody yanked out my batteries”. Every shred of energy is suddenly gone. Who knew it takes energy to just close your eyes? Trust me — it does, and in the midst of chemo and radiation therapy that was almost more energy than I could muster. So, speaking from extensive personal experience, I say to you that one of the greatest gifts you can give to a Breast Cancer Warrior is hands-on assistance with the innumerable tasks of day-to-day living.

And so, I recommend the following free and fabulous holiday gift idea: a Gift Card, from The Store Of You. Made redeemable for any of the following, it will be a priceless gift for the Breast Cancer Warrior in your life:

Babysitting

If the BC Warrior in your life is the mother of youngsters, offer to watch the kids (in your home) on specific days, for specified hours.

Even better: Read the rest of this entry »

(PLEASE NOTE- Interview was rescheduled due to technical difficulties.We’ll now be appearing Monday, 12/14 at 2:00 pm EST) Hey, girlfriends, we’ll be appearing live Monday, December 14 at 2:00 pm eastern with Debba Haupert of Girlfriendology on BlogTalkRadio! We’ll be talking about celebrating the holidays with your girlfriends, and you can even call in with questions. We’d love to hear from you! Listen live on the web at www.blogtalkradio.com/girlfriendology or, you can download the podcast and listen at your leisure. (We will post the link to the podcast when it’s available). Have a great weekend!

Looking for a simple yet chic way to present the holiday meal, perhaps for a girlfriend gathering? We can always count on our girlfriend Jen Luby of Second City Soiree to have impeccable taste and do-able entertaining ideas. She recently posted this chic Hanukkah party menu detailing how to have a latke bar, better brisket, delicious donuts and the perfect cocktails for the occasion. We wanted to share it with you, with her permission. Enjoy, and Happy Hanukkah!

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Hey girlfriends, you know, we love a good excuse to get together with our girlfriends, online or in real life.  And YES, sometimes this does involve shopping—especially for good deals! So, we were thrilled to be asked to co-host a “twitter party” on the evening of Friday, November 20, from 7 – 9 pm EST. Click here to read the official invitation, RSVP, and find out how to enter the first giveaway now simply by retweeting!

We’re so excited to be taking part in this one-of-a-kind twitter event! Using the hashtag #BFParty, we’ll be hanging out on twitter and enjoying:

• Exclusive access to online discounts
• Previews of Black Friday sales
• DoorBuster Sales from your Favorite Retailers
• Giveaways from American Express, Eli’s Cheesecake, Whole Foods and more!

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The other day we received a lovely email from Ed Han of Tiny Prints, thanking us for participating in The Gratitude Challenge. Tiny Prints has put together an inspiring video about the challenge, which you can watch below. Even better, they’ve now made the Gratitude Challenge available to everyone! You can download the Gratitude Challenge pledge, download the Gratitude Challenge calendar with all the tasks and prompts for the 21-day challenge, and add a Gratitude Challenge widget to your own blog. We really hope you will check it out and consider taking the challenge yourself. It only takes 21 days to form a grateful habit that could change your life! If you’d like to revisit our gratitude journey, you can check out all our Gratitude Challenge posts here.

Watch the video and read an excerpt from Ed’s letter below.

“We started this project as a internal movement focused on helping our colleagues to achieve one simple goal—to counter everyday stress and negativity with daily affirmations of gratitude. As The Gratitude Challenge grew to include bloggers outside of our company, however, we learned just how much gratitude can change a person’s life.

From tornadoes to car accidents, fires and family drama, The Gratitude Challenge saw our bloggers through meaningful, life-changing events. We learned so much from this experience that we made a short video about how gratitude can revitalize your perspective.” [watch it above]

“We hope this experience has meant as much to you as it has to us, and we hope that you and your readers will to continue to follow our progress as we invite the world to join the movement at gratitudechallenge.com.

Ed Han

Tiny Prints Founder & CEO

Life is Like a Bowl of Stone Soup“

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So many of you have asked us how to make new friends, and whether we offer a service to help women make friends in real life. Well, we don’t. But now, we know just who to recommend! Shasta Nelson has started GirlFriendCircles, an on-line service that helps you meet circles of women offline, in real life, who are also looking for new girlfriends! In several U.S. cities, GirlfriendCircles is introducing women and facilitating their get-togethers, helping them find new gal pals. It’s about time! This is a much-needed service, and we wish Shasta great success. We hope you’ll all check out her site and give GirlfriendCircles a try. We were honored to write a guest post for GirlfriendCircles on how to make and keep new friends. As you know, keeping friendships alive can be a challenge. Once you’ve met some new potential girlfriends, you need to keep the friendship going—and growing—in the right direction. We’ve got some great tips for preventing “friendship fizzle.” Read the post here.