Public (or Bank) Holidays
People in the UK usually call public holidays bank holidays – because banks close on these days. If a public holiday falls on a weekend day (on a Saturday or a Sunday), the holiday usually moves to the following Monday. This is so that people don’t lose the holiday if it falls on a weekend, which is usually a day off for many people.
Bank holidays celebrated all over the UK include Christmas Day (25 December), Boxing Day or St Stephen’s Day (26 December), New Year’s Day (1 January), Easter Monday and Good Friday (the dates for these two days vary every year, but they usually occur in March or April). In addition to these mainly religious holidays are the May Day bank holiday (the first Monday in May), the spring bank holiday (the last Monday in May) and the summer bank holiday (the last Monday in August).
The May Day bank holiday occurs on 1 May, or on the next Monday after 1 May.
In many countries 1 May is International Workers’ Day, although in the UK the May Day bank holiday isn’t always associated with this and is celebrated more as a spring festival. Some towns, such as Whitstable in Kent and Hastings in Sussex, hold festivals with traditional music and dancing for May Day.
New Year (1 January)
In the Gregorian calendar, New Year starts on 1 January, and that day is always a public holiday in the UK. The night of 31 December – New Year’s Eve – is a time of celebration, and parties (both public and private) take place everywhere. In some cities people like to go to the central square of the town to listen to the clocks strike midnight and to bring in the new year.
Particularly large public gatherings for New Year in Britain take place around the London Eye in London and in Cardiff, Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, Glasgow and Edinburgh. A canon is fired from Edinburgh Castle at midnight.
Television channels broadcast many of these celebrations live.
New Year in Scotland is called Hogmanay, and it has its own unique tradi- tions. One of the best-known Hogmanay traditions is called first footing, which involves visiting friends or neighbours and being the first person to set your foot over the doorstep, which brings good luck to the house for the rest of the year. Traditionally, first footers carried symbolic gifts such as salt, coal or whiskey. Nowadays it’s more common to simply visit friends and neighbours during the night of 31 December – and this can continue into the early hours of 1 January and even continue until 2 January, which is also a public holiday in Scotland (but not in the rest of the UK).
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Chinese New Year (January or February)
Chinese New Year is the most important event in the Chinese lunar calen- dar. In the UK people celebrate this holiday in cities that have large Chinese communities. London claims to have one of the biggest Chinese New Year parades outside of Asia.
In Soho, the heart of the Chinese community in London, also known as Chinatown, people put up red paper lanterns up in the streets two weeks before the Chinese New Year celebrations begin, and take them down two weeks later. During the celebrations themselves, groups of dancers carry- ing paper and cloth dragons dance through the streets to music and singing.
Chinatown is a very small part of London, so it can get very crowded with tourists and visitors at this time of year.
Chinese New Year is usually celebrated with the family, with people exchang- ing small gifts of food and sweets, and red envelopes of money. It is also the time to give the house a thorough clean. The most important part of Chinese New Year is a large dinner with the family. In China, Chinese New Year lasts 15 days, although in the West Chinese communities may celebrate a slightly shorter version of the holiday.
Valentine’s Day (14 February)
People celebrate Valentine’s Day, or Saint Valentine’s Day, on the same day – 14 February – all over the world. It is the day on which lovers express their feelings for each other, and give each other cards and gifts such as flowers or chocolates. St Valentine was an early Christian saint, and his name became associated with romantic love in the early Middle Ages in Western Europe. In the early 19th century it became popular for lovers to exchange hand-written love letters or notes on Valentine’s Day, and nowadays lovers exchange com- mercially produced greeting cards.
Valentine’s Day is an extremely commercial celebration in the UK, and it’s almost obligatory to buy chocolate and cards for your partner on the day.
For this reason some people are critical of Valentine’s Day.
St Patrick’s Day (17 March)
St Patrick is the patron saint of Ireland, but people celebrate St Patrick’s Day all over the world, not only in Ireland. The most famous (and the largest)
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St Patrick’s Day’s parade takes place in New York City with up to 2 million spectators! People also celebrate St Patrick’s Day in the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada – in fact, anywhere where a sizeable Irish community exists. The holiday is a Christian festival but it also celebrates everything Irish, and the dominant colour of St Patrick’s Day is green. Large St Patrick’s Day parades in the UK take place in Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester and in London around Trafalgar Square – in 2008 people dyed the water of the fountain in Trafalgar Square green for St Patrick’s Day.
One of the best-known alcoholic drinks from Ireland is Guinness, a dark beer, and before St Patrick’s Day you see many pubs in the UK announcing spe- cial deals on Guinness and other beers to celebrate St Patrick’s Day. On St Patrick’s Day, you find pubs around the UK full of people celebrating, even if they aren’t Irish.
Mother’s Day (March) and Father’s Day (June)
If you happen to be in the UK on Mother’s Day or on Father’s Day, you’ll prob- ably first find out about this event by looking at shop windows. Many people complain that Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are purely commercial and that shops promote these occasions just to make money. Where does Mother’s Day come from? One explanation is that Mother’s Day comes from the USA and was invented by a woman called Anna Jarvis in 1912. But at the end of her life she was so disappointed at how commercial the day had become that she protested publicly against it, was arrested by police for disturbing the peace and said that she wished she had never thought of creating Mother’s Day in the first place.
Mother’s Day is held on different dates in different parts of the world. In the UK Mother’s Day falls on the fourth Sunday of Lent (a period in the Christian calendar) and is celebrated usually in March. Typically, on Mother’s Day chil- dren buy their mothers flowers or a small gift of chocolates or jewellery, and a greeting card.
Father’s Day is similar in many ways to Mother’s Day. It’s held on different dates in different parts of the world and just as Mother’s Day celebrates motherhood, Father’s Day celebrates fatherhood. Children typically buy small gifts for their fathers. The idea behind Father’s Day also comes origi- nally from the United States in the early 1900s, and the US passed a law in 1966 which made it an official day in that country. In the UK, people celebrate Father’s Day on the third Sunday in June.
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Notting Hill Carnival (London, August)
Carnival is a festival associated with the Christian calendar, and is mainly celebrated in Catholic countries. Carnival usually takes place between late January and late February every year. Probably the most famous Carnival celebrations in the world are those held in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, in New Orleans in the USA (also called Mardi Gras) and in Venice in Italy.
Britain isn’t an obvious venue for Carnival, as it’s mainly a Protestant Christian country. In the UK, immigrants from the West Indies brought with them the Caribbean Carnival, and in London every year the famous Notting Hill Carnival is held in the summer. This Carnival is no longer connected to religion in any way, and it’s even held at a completely different time of year to Carnival in other countries, but the roots of this Carnival come from the Christian tradition. The Notting Hill Carnival is led by the Caribbean com- munity in the area, many of whom have lived there since the 1950s. It has become a huge annual event in the UK, and can attract more than 2 million visitors during the two days that it’s held every August. This makes it the second biggest street carnival in the world after Rio!
The Notting Hill Carnival was first held in 1959 as a reaction against racist attacks against the Caribbean community in London, and since then it has become a celebration of the multicultural nature of London. People from all over the world attend this event.
Apart from the Notting Hill Carnival, some other towns and cities in Britain hold an annual carnival. This kind of carnival isn’t connected to the Christian calendar either, and can mean a street parade or a festival.
Halloween (31 October)
Americans celebrate Halloween more than the British, but in recent years it has become increasingly popular in Britain and in certain parts of Europe.
The word Halloween originally comes from All Hallows Eve, and it is also known as All Saints Day. All Hallows Eve (the night of 31 October) involves honouring the dead and in some countries, such as Spain and Mexico, fami- lies visit graveyards on 1 November in order to honour and remember dead members of the family. The family may say prayers, offer flowers and clean and tidy the grave.
From this celebration of ‘the day of the dead’ come many of the commercial images we associate today with Halloween – skulls, skeletons and children dressing up as supernatural figures.
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Traditions for Halloween today include trick or treating, in which children dress up as ghosts or witches or in other costumes and visit neighbouring houses to ask for sweets.
Other typical images of Halloween include carved pumpkins with candles inside. The main impetus for importing Halloween from the USA into Britain and Europe has come from commerce – companies hope to make money from selling Halloween goods. For this reason British and other European people often see the holiday with sceptical eyes.
Bonfire Night (5 November)
People celebrate this festival, also called Guy Fawkes Night, in the UK and in some other countries of the Commonwealth such as New Zealand and South Africa. The day marks an event from 5 November 1605 in which a group of men, including Guy Fawkes, were caught planning to blow up the Houses of Parliament in London. There’s some controversy over the celebration of this date – some people claim that there was no plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament and that these men were framed because they were all Catholics.
Whatever the historical truth behind the incident, people still celebrate Bonfire Night in many parts of the UK, with fireworks and large bonfires. It’s common to put an effigy or figure of a man on the fire – this figure originally represented Guy Fawkes, but in modern times people like to burn effigies of unpopular politicians. One of the biggest celebrations of Bonfire Night takes place in Lewes, near Brighton in southern England – this small town usually has up to six large bonfires on Bonfire Night.
Armistice Day (11 November)
Armistice Day celebrates the end of the First World War on 11 November 1918. The war formally ended at 11 o’clock in the morning on 11 November –
‘the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month’. Armistice Day is a day on which to remember and honour the dead of the First World War in many of the Allied countries (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa and the UK). It’s also called Remembrance Day and Veterans’ Day. In the UK, people often observe two minutes of silence in public places on 11 November.
You may also hear this day called Poppy Day. A poppy is a small red flower with a black centre. The flower symbolises the fields of northern France, covered with poppies in the spring, on which so many soldiers died. On Armistice Day the streets of many of the cities in the UK have people selling plastic poppies, which you can put in the buttonhole of your jacket or shirt.
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Chapter 18
Ten Phrases That Make You Sound Fluent in English
In This Chapter
▶ Sounding like a native
▶ Avoiding common pitfalls
Sounding like a native in most languages involves having enough every- day language to be able to talk to people on different levels – sometimes it’s just social, like talking about the weather and asking about friends and family, and sometimes it’s work-related, like being able to talk about your job.
Often it’s a mix of the two.
But most countries have little stock phrases that are in constant use, and these phrases can help you fit in a little better and sound a little more like a native speaker.
We can’t cover all of the phrases in this chapter, but here we present ten that can make a difference in certain situations. Of course, it’s important not to use the phrases too often – listen to other speakers of English and see how often they use them, and when, and you’ll soon be sounding native yourself.
Actually
People are divided in their opinions over the use of the word actually:
some people think that British people use it too much and should think about other ways of starting sentences; others use it all the time and have no problem with the word. In the most basic form, actually means something along the lines of ‘in actual fact’ or ‘really’ – but you find it starting a lot of sentences in English, and almost with no real meaning any more. It’s just a word to introduce thoughts, ideas or . . . well, anything, really. Here are some examples – you can try taking the word actually out of them to see if they still make sense:
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✓ Actually, I need to finish this report before I go home.
✓ Actually, he’s not working this week.
✓ Actually, we’re staying in tonight – too much work to do!
You can safely remove the word actually and the sentences are unchanged. But it’s a very popular word in English, so using it gives you that ‘native’ edge.
You may also hear people starting or finishing similar sentences with the phrase ‘as it happens’ – this doesn’t mean much either, it simply introduces or highlights a piece of information into a discussion, and people often use this phrase instead of actually:
✓ As it happens, she’s on holiday this week.
✓ I don’t really like Italian food, as it happens.
Bless You!
Sneezing is supposed to be a very simple thing – you sneeze, you perhaps excuse yourself for making such a noise and then everybody carries on doing what they were doing. But of course it’s more complicated than that, because in many countries and languages it’s customary for people to react to a sneeze.
In English people generally say ‘bless you’ when somebody sneezes. This is a short form of the phrase ‘God bless you’, and people have many theories for why we say this. Most of the theories involve religion, bad luck or dis- ease. If you want to know more about the possible origins, take a look at the Wikipedia entry here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bless_you.
What you don’t want to do is shout out a translation of ‘bless you’ in your native language. For example, if you’re Spanish and visiting London, you don’t want to shout out ‘Jesus!’ (the Spanish translation of ‘bless you’) when some- one sneezes. In English, people often use ‘Jesus!’ as a sign of frustration and so this wouldn’t have the same meaning as ‘bless you’.
You can find out more about different linguistic reactions to sneezing around the world here: www.mamalisa.com/blog/how-do-you-sneeze-in- your-country.
Bon Appétit!
It’s a popular myth that British food is terrible – and impossible to find among the Italian, Chinese, Greek and other restaurants usually found in
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