TRADITIONS AND HOLIDAYS OF GREAT BRITAIN,TRADITIONS AND HOLIDAYS OF GREAT BRITAIN

TRADITIONS AND HOLIDAYS OF GREAT BRITAIN

Every nation and every country has its own traditions and customs. Traditions make a nation special. Some of them are very old and many people remember them, others are part of people’s life. Some British customs and traditions are known all over the world.

From Scotland to Cornwall, Britain is full of customs and traditions. A lot of them have a very long history. Some of them are funny and some are strange. But they all aare interesting. They all are part of the British way of life.

English traditions can be classified into several groups: traditions concerning the Englishmen’s private life (child’s birth, wedding, marriage, wedding anniversary); which are connected with families incomes; state traditions; national holidays, religious holidays, public festivals, traditional ceremonies.

Christmas is the most popular holiday in Britain. Christmas has been celebrated from the earliest days of recorded history, and each era and ethnic group has pasted a colourful sheet of new customs aand traditions.

On Sunday before Christmas many churches hold a carol service where special hymns are sung. Sometimes carol singers can be heard in the streets as they collect money for charity. There are many very popular British Christmas carols. TThe famoust ones are: “Good King Wenceslas”, “The Holly and the Ivy” and “We Three Kings”.

Each year, hundreds of thousands of people all over the world send and receive Christmas cards. Most of people think that exchanging cards at Christmas is a very ancient custom but it is not right. In fact it is barely 100 years old. The idea of exchanging illustrated greeting and presents is, however, ancient. The first commercial Christmas card was produced in Britain in 1843 by Henry Cole, who was the founder of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The hand coloured print was inscribed with the words “A Merry Christmas and A Happy New Year to you”. It was horizontally rectangular in shape, pprinted on stout cardboard by lithography.

December 26th is Boxing Day. It is called like that because traditionally boys from the shops in each town went to ask for money at Christmas. They went from house to house on December 26th and take boxes made of wood with them. At each house people gave them money. This was a Christmas present. So the name of December 26th does not come from the sport of boxing – it comes from the boys’ wwooden boxes. Now Boxing Day is an extra holiday after Christmas Day.

Traditionally Boxing Day Hunts is a day for foxhunting. The huntsmen and huntswomen ride horses. They use dogs, too. The dogs (fox hounds) follow the smell of a fox. Then the huntsmen and huntswomen follow the hounds. Before a Boxing Day hunt, the huntsmen and huntswomen drink hot wine. But the tradition of the December 26th hunt is changing. Now, some people want to stop Boxing Day Hunts (and other hunts, too). They do not like foxhunting. For them it is not a sport – it is cruelty.

On October 31st British people celebrate Halloween. It is undoubtedly the most colourful and exciting holiday of the year. Though it is not a public holiday, it is very dear to those who celebrate it, especially to children and teenagers. This day was originally called All Hallow’s Eve because it fell on the eve of All Saints’ Day. The name was later shortened to Halloween. According to old beliefs, Halloween is the time, when the veil between the living and the dead is partially lifted, and witches, ghosts and other super natural beings are about. Now children celebrate Halloween wearing unusual costumes aand masks. It is a festival of merrymaking, superstitions spells, fortune telling, traditional games and pranks. Halloween is a time for fun.

Few holidays tell us much of the past as Halloween. Its origins date back to a time, when people believed in devils, witches and ghosts. Many Halloween customs are based on beliefs of the ancient Celts, who lived more than 2,000 years ago in what is now Great Britain, Ireland, and northern France.

Halloween customs today follow many of the ancient traditions, though their significance has long since disappeared.

A favourite Halloween custom is to make a jack-j’-lantern. Children take out the middle of the pumpkin, cut holes for the eyes, nose and mouth on its side and, finally, they put a candle inside the pumpkin to scare their friends. The candle burning inside makes the orange face visible from far away on a dark night. A delicious pumpkin-pie is made of the pulp.

People in England and Ireland carved out beets, potatoes, and turnips to make jack-o’-lanterns on Halloween. When the Scots and Irish came to the United States, they brought their customs with them. But they began to carve faces on pumpkins because they were more plentiful in autumn than tturnips. Nowadays, British carve faces on pumpkins, too.

On Bank holiday the townsfolk usually flock into the country and to the coast. If the weather is fine, many families take a picnic – lunch or tea with them and enjoy their meal in the open air. Seaside towns near London, such as Southend, are invaded by thousands of trippers, who come in cars and coaches, trains and bicycles. Great amusement parks like Southend Kursoal do a roaring trade with their scenic railways, shooting galleries, water-shoots, Crazy houses and so on. Trippers wear comic paper hats with slogans, and they eat and drink the weirdest mixture of stuff you can imagine, sea food like cockles, mussels, whelks, fish and chips, candy floss, tea, fizzy drinks, everything you can imagine.

Bank holiday is also an occasion for big sports meeting at places like the White City Stadium, mainly all kinds of athletics. There are also horse race meetings all over the country, and most traditional of all, there are large fairs with swings, roundabouts, a Punch and Judy show, hoop-la stalls and every kind of side-show including, in recent, bingo. There is also much boating activity on the Thames.

Although the Christian religion gave the

world Easter as we know it today, the celebration owes its name and many of its customs and symbols to a pagan festival called Eostre. Eostre, the Anglo-Saxon goddess of springtime and sunrise, got her name from the world east, where the sunrises. Every spring northern European people celebrated the festival of Eostre to honour the awakening of new life in nature. Christians related the rising of the sun to the resurrection of Jesus and their own spiritual rebirth.

Many modern EEaster symbols come from the pagan time. The egg, for instance, was a fertility symbol long before the Christian era. The ancient Persians, Greeks and Chinese exchanged eggs at their spring ...