where does bless you after a sneeze come from
God bless you The practice of blessing someone who sneezes dates as far back as at least AD 77, although it is far older than most specific explanations can account for.[9] Some have offered an explanation suggesting that people once held the folk belief that a person's soul could be thrown from their body when they sneezed,[9] that sneezing otherwise opened the body to invasion by the Devil or evil spirits,[10][11] or that sneezing was the body's effort to force out an invading evil presence.[9] In these cases, "God bless you" or "bless you" is used as a sort of shield against evil.[12] The Irish Folk story "Master and Man" by Thomas Crofton Croker, collected by William Butler Yeats, describes this variation.[13] Moreover, in the past some people may have thought that the heart stops beating during a sneeze, and that the phrase "God bless you" encourages the heart to continue beating.[9][10][11]
God Bless the U.S.A. "God Bless the U.S.A." is an American patriotic song written and recorded by country music artist Lee Greenwood, and is considered to be his signature song. The first album it appears on is 1984's You've Got a Good Love Comin'. It reached No. 7 on the Billboard magazine Hot Country Singles chart when originally released in the spring of 1984, and was played at the 1984 Republican National Convention with President Ronald Reagan and first lady Nancy Reagan in attendance, but the song gained greater prominence during the Gulf War in 1990 and 1991, as a way of boosting morale.