Britain has a strong tradition of observing religious and secular holidays and special occasions throughout the year, from Christmas and New Year celebrations focused around family gatherings, food, gifts and religious traditions, to summer seaside holidays, Halloween, Guy Fawkes Night and Boxing Day hunts. Holidays have evolved over time from their original religious meanings to include more commercial and leisure activities, though traditions like carol singing and exchanging Christmas cards remain an important part of British holiday culture. Modern holidays also include shorter weekend breaks, activity holidays, and holidays at Butlin's camps which offered organized entertainment in self-contained villages.

2. • Britain is a country governed by routine
• It has fewer public holidays than other
country in Europe and North America. Even
New Year’s Day was not official public
holiday in England and Wales.
• There are almost no semi-official holidays
either and no traditional extra local holidays
in particular places

3. • The word holiday is “holy day”
• The word originally referred only to
special religious days
• In modern use, it means any special day
of rest or relaxation, as opposed to
normal days away from work or school.

4. • The British seem to do comparatively
badly with regard to annual holidays.
• Although the average employee gets
four weeks’ paid holiday a year, in no
town or city in the country would a
visitor ever get the impression that the
place had “shut down” for the summer
break.

6. • The British upper class started the
fashion for seaside holidays in the last
eighteenth century.
• The middle classes soon followed them
and when they were given the
opportunity.

11. BOARDING HOUSES

12. Daytime the children make sandcastles,
buy ice-creams and sometimes go for
donkey rides.

13. Adults are happy just to sit in their deck chair and
occasionally go for paddle with their skirts or
trouser-legs hitched up.

14. For adults who swim, some resorts have wooden huts
on or near the beach known as ‘ beach cabins’, ‘beach
huts’ or ‘bathing hut’, in which people can change into
their swimming costumes.

15. For the evenings, and when it is
raining, there are amusement
arcades, bingo halls, dance halls,
discos, theatres, bowling alleys
and so on, many of these situated
on the pier.

16. • There is one kind of sweet
associated with holiday resorts.
This is ‘rock’ a hard thick stick of
sugar.
• Each resort has the letters of its
name appearing throughout the
stick.

19. • Another traditional holidays destination, which was
very popular in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, is the
holiday camp, where visitor stay chalets in selfcontained villages with all food and entertainment
organized for them.
• Butlin’s and Pontin’s, the companies which own
most of these, are well-known names in Britain.
The enforced good-humour, strict meal-times and
events such as ‘knobbly knees’ competitions and
beauty contests that were characteristic of these
camp have now given way to a more relaxed
atmosphere.

22. MODERN HOLIDAYS
• Half of all the holidays taken within Britain are
now for 3 days or less. Every bank-holiday
weekend there are long traffic jams along the
routes to the most popular holiday areas.
• The traditional seaside resorts have survived by
adjusting themselves to this trend. But there
are also many other types of holiday.

23. MODERN HOLIDAYS
• Hiking in the country and sleeping at youth hostels
has long been popular and so, among an
enthusiastic minority, has pot-holing. There are
also wide range of ‘activity’ holidays available.
• An increasing number of people now go on
‘working’ holidays, during which they might help
to repair an ancient stone wall or take part in an
archaeological dig. This is an echo of another
traditional type of ‘holiday’- fruit picking.

24. • Humorous postcard like the one
below can still be bought at seaside
resorts.
• The joke always has an element of
sexual innuendo in it.

26. CHRISTMAS
and NEW YEAR

27. Christmas
• An occasion in modern Britain when a
large number of customs are
enthusiastically observed by most
ordinary people within the family
• In modern time, Christmas has little
effect on religious traditions
• Christmas has been “commercialized”

28. Commercialization of Christmas
Every November in Oxford Street, a famous personality
ceremoniously switches on the “Christmas lights” to start the
Christmas shopping period
Westlife switch on Christmas lights in Oxford Street

29. Commercialization of Christmas
Between that time and the middle of January, most shops do
nearly half of their total business for the year
People shopping for Christmas

30. What do they buy?
Presents for family members, especially
children, and close friends

31. What do they buy?
• Christmas cards for wider circle of friends and
relatives, working associates and neighbours
They are often show scenes from the nineteenth or eighteenth centuries
and may be set in the countryside, very frequently covered with snow

32. What do they buy?
Christmas trees and decorations

33. Christmas Decorations
Holly plant
Mistletoe plant

34. Christmas Decorations
Cribs which are models depicting the birth of Christ

35. Carols
In December, carols are sung in churches, schools or
go from house to house collecting money for
charitable causes

36. The Christmas Party
The last working afternoon before Christmas is the
time of the annual office party
ALCOHOL

37. The Christmas Party
• Sexual feelings come into open
• The peak time for complaints of sexual harassment
is in January – just after the annual office party

38. Father Christmas
Santa Claus

40. Christmas Tree
Presents are put around or on the Christmas tree and
opened at some time on Christmas day

41. Christmas Dinner
The traditional meal consist of stuffed roast turkey
with roast potatoes and some other vegetable

42. Other Foods
Christmas pudding
Extremely heavy sweet dish
made of dried fruits
Christmas cake
An equally heavy fruit
cake, with hard white icing
on top

43. Queen’s Christmas Message
This ten-minute television broadcast is normally the
only time in the year when the monarch speaks
directly to ‘her‘ people on television

44. A Time for Families
For many people, Christmas is the only time
that they are all together

46. New Year In
Britain

47. New Year’s Eve
• Parties are usually for friends
• Most people attend a gathering at this time and
‘see in’ the New Year with a group of other people,
often drinking a large amount of alcohol as they
do so.
• TV is very popular on New Year’s Eve with
millions of British watching New Year’s
celebrations
• Regardless of where you are on New Year’s Eve,
there is a tradition of counting down to midnight
and people hug and kiss each other and wish
each other ‘ Happy New Year’.

48. Trafalgar Square

49. New Year’s Day
• New Year’s Day is a designated public holiday in the UK
• This is a single day of the year when a high percentage of
the population will be suffering from lack of sleep and very
possibly a hangover.
• Almost everyone will have stayed awake until midnight the
night before to welcome in the New Year, many people will
have stayed awake far longer.
• Because the New Year’s Day follows such a heavy night
as New Year’s Eve, and making as it does the end of the
holiday season of Christmas, it tends to be a fairly
subdued day in most home.

50. New Year’s Day at the Pub
• A smaller celebration
similar to New Year’s Eve
will happen in a
spontaneous way.
• Around lunchtime many
people will pop into their
local pub for a hair of the
dog to brighten them up
after the long night, and to
wish a Happy New Year to
their friends.

51. New Year’s Evening
• Most people are tired from the festive
season overall, and New Year’s Day
evening is seen as something of the wind up
session, where people gather with loved
ones, and spend time reminiscing over the
past year, recalling those that passed away,
and planning for the future.
• Usually this will happen at home, often over
a small meal, or more typically buffet, with a
few drinks.

52. New Year In Scotland
• In Scotland, where the Calvinists
disapproved of parties and celebrations
connected with religious occasions , New
Year, called Hogmanay, is given particular
importance – so much importance that, in
Scotland only, 2 January is also a public
holiday that people have two days to
recover from their New Some British New
Year customs, such as the singing of the
song Auld Lang Syne

53. New Year In Scotland
• Another, less
common, one is
the custom of ‘first
footing’, in which
the first person to
visit a house in the
new year is
supported to arrive
with tokens of
certain important
items for survival

54. Take down Christmas Decorations

55. SPECIAL
OCCASIONS
AND
HOLIDAYS

58. SYMBOL
GIFTS

64.  Lent : a forty-day period of fasting,
prayer, and penance
 Holly Week : the last week of the
Lent, contains Good Friday
 Good Friday : commemorating the
crucifixion and death of Jesus
 Pentecost Sunday :
commemorating the descent of the
Holy Spirit upon the disciples of Christ
after the Resurrection

70. GUY FAWKES NIGHT

71. Thanksgiving for the
plot's failure
Firecrackers, fireworks
and a big fired pile of
woods
Little children brought a
mannequin for asking
money from adult, and
said: "Penny for the guy"

73. PUMPKIN
TRICK or TREAT
COSTUME

76. Boxing Day Hunts

77. Time for gathering family

79. “The wren, the wren, the king of
all birds
On Boxing Day was caught in the
furze,
We hunted him far and hunted
him near
And found him under the bushes
here.
Hurrah, my boys, hurrah!
Hurrah, my boys, hurrah!
Knock at the knocker and ring at
the bell,
And give us a copper for singing so
well

80. Which Christmas card is more popular in
Britain ?
A.
B.
C.

82. Panto (Pantomine)
• A popular theatrical
tradition
• Involve the acting out of a
well-known folk tale with
plenty of opportunity for
audience participation
• The continuing popularity
of panto is assisted by the
fact that leading roles are
today frequently taken by
well-known personalities
from the worlds of
television or sport