Never Too Late to Send Flowers to Grandparents.

It’s Not Too Late To Honor A Grandparent

Way back in the early 1970s, a woman named Marian McQuade looked around her and saw that young people weren’t really respecting their elders. Worse than that, many elderly people in nursing homes spent their days forgotten and alone, with no family to visit them and help them pass the time.

She decided that something should be done, and started campaigning for a National Grandparent’s Day. It started out as a grass roots campaign, but gradually through the years various states did indeed set aside a Grandparent’s Day, and in 1978, President Jimmy Carter made it a national event, to be held on the first Sunday after Labor Day.

According to the charter for Grandparent’s Day:

Grandparents are our continuing tie to the near-past, to events and beliefs and experiences that so strongly affect our lives and the world around us. Whether they are our own or surrogate grandparents who fill some of the gaps in our mobile society, our senior generation also provides our society a link to our national heritage and traditions.

Well, since it’s late September, obviously we’ve missed the official Grandparent’s Day in 2008, but that doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate grandparents, in honor of Mrs. McQuade, who died at the glorious age of 91 on September 26, 2008.

Particularly in the Norfolk and Virginia Beach areas of Virginia, where many parents are in the military and are sent overseas on a regular basis, grandparents regularly rally round to care for their grandchildren.

Time to send them a vase of flowers or a gift basket as an extra special gift for all they do.

But it’s not just about celebrating your own grandparents.

There are plenty of nursing and assisted living homes in Norfolk and Virginia Beach, and indeed, in the entire Tidewater area, where seniors live. For those who are shut-ins, they never get out to see anyone, never get to share their memories and their experience, and that’s a pity…and National Grandparent’s Day was also meant to call attention to them, and to honor them.

And when you visit a nursing home in search of a surrogate grandparent, or just to spend some time with people, why not bring a beautiful basket of fresh flowers along?

To order flowers for your grandparents shop Turpinsflorist.com today

How to Select A Florist

How to Select a Florist

When you need to send a bouquet or gift basket to cheer up a friend, or celebrate a birthday or anniversary, you know how important it is that that bouquet or basket has to be “just right.” It has to look wonderful, be wonderful, and arrive on time.

As the saying goes, you only have one chance to make a good first impression. If there’s a problem with the delivery or the product, a replacement bouquet or basket sure won’t have the same impact as that first arrival.

So when choosing a florist, you want to make sure you’re dealing with a reputable company that has a reputation for delivering excellent flowers or gift baskets, nicely designed, and that will arrive on time at its destination. You also want to make sure that the prices you spend are comparable.

1. Reputation for fresh flowers, tastefully arranged

2. Reputation for varieties of flowers, from common to exotic

3. Reputation for on-time delivery

4. Reputation for friendly sales people and floral designers

5. Reputation for comparable price with competitors

While it is certainly possible to visit florists on the web – practically every florist business these days will have a website of some kind, it’s also nice to be able to visit a “bricks-and-mortar” store and talk to the friendly service people there. You can see their offerings at first hand, smell ‘em, touch ‘em, enjoy ‘em.

But a florist’s website is also crucial. At their website, you can see all the information you need to know, from their opening and closing hours, to their delivery times, to the flowers and gift baskets they have on offer, to their prices, to their delivery charges.

You can also purchase flowers, plants, gift baskets and so on from their website, and once again you can compare prices on each item.

Oh, those prices. Price should never be your first or even second consideration when ordering flowers for a friend or loved one. There’s no point in paying a little bit of money for an inferior product, that’s worse than sending nothing at all. On the other hand, you don’t want to pay an exorbitant amount of money, either.

That’s the joy of surfing the internet, you can compare prices on a variety of florists, and combining that with information you already know, make an informed decision.

Some florists have been in business for decades – as for example, Turpin’s Florist! However, some have sprouted up overnight…and how can you tell the wheat from the chaff. Well, there’s always the Better Business Bureau (www.bbb.com) a company that keeps track of any complaints made against a business. It’s always a good thing to check out the BBB whenever you are about to do business with a new company.

Then of course there’s word of mouth. If your friends have had good experiences with a certain florist, they’ll probably direct you there, too. You’ll still want to check them out, though.