Lecture 3 of Culture study
- 2. Easter Easter is the most important festival in the church year: more important than Christmas. It begins with Good Friday which is the day the Romans killed Jesus Christ, in Jerusalem, about two thousand years ago. Two days later, on Easter Sunday, Christians believe that Jesus returned to life.
- 3. Easter is now a Christian festival but the word ‘Easter’ comes from ‘Eostre’, the pagan goddess of spring. Easter Day is the Sunday after the first full moon after the first day of spring (21 March). It is different every year, but always between 22 March and 25 April. Many animals and birds are born in the spring. So when people started to send Easter cards in the nineteenth century, the cards often had baby sheep, rabbits or birds on them.
- 4. An Easter cards Easter eggs
- 5. Eggs are an important part of Easter because they mean spring and new life. One Easter tradition is ‘egg-rolling’. People decorate eggs with different colours, then take the eggs to the top of the hill and the eggs roll down. The first egg to get to the foot of the hill is the winner.
- 6. On Easter Sunday, people give chocolate Easter eggs as presents. These eggs started in Europe in the early nineteenth century and came to Britain in the 1870s. Today some of the eggs are empty, others have small chocolates inside; some are very small, some very big. Some mothers and fathers tell their children that the Easter Rabbit brings the eggs and hides them in the garden. The children must go outside and look for them.
- 7. Many people also eat hot cross buns at Easter. These are small loaves of bread, made with fruit and spices, and they have a cross on top. They are best hot, and there is an old song about them: Hot cross buns, hot cross buns, One a penny, two a penny, Hot cross buns. If you have no daughters, Give them to your sons, One a penny, two a penny, Hot cross buns.
- 8. Hot cross buns Some women and girls decorate hats, called Easter bonnets. They put lots of spring flowers on them, and wear them in Easter bonnet parades. Many people go to church on Easter Day. There are lots of flowers in the churches and people sing special Easter songs.
- 9. Easter Monday is a holiday for everyone, so a lot of people watch some sport, or go out for the day. Children usually have a week or two holiday from school around Easter. Easter bonnets
- 10. The Fourth of July During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many people sailed from England to America and started a new life there. New homes like this in other countries were called colonies. The King of England was still king of the people in the colonies, and so they had to send money (taxes) to England every year. But the thirteen American colonies wanted to be free from England; they wanted their government to be in America. They did not want send money to England and were very angry about this.
- 11. In 1770 British soldiers fired guns at some of these people in Boston, and in 1773 there was the famous Boston Tea Party. A tea-ship came to Boston and there was a fight about paying taxes on the tea. Three hundred and forty big boxes of tea went into the water! Now King George III and his government were angry too. On 4 July 1776, Thomas Jefferson and his friends wrote the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia.
- 12. The British and the Americans fought each other until 1781 in the American War of Independence. In 1783, both sides agreed to the independence of America, and so the United States of America was born. The first Fourth of July celebration was in Philadelphia in 1777. The ships fired their guns and there was a lot of noise. Now, every year on the Fourth of July, Americans celebrate Independence Day.
- 13. Fourth of July parade in USA
- 14. There are special church services at this time, but most of the celebrations are outside because it is summer. Many families barbecue, eat, and play games outside, in their gardens or in a park. In many towns, there are parades through the streets with loud music and bright colours. The red, white and blue American flag flies everywhere. It has fifty white stars and thirteen stripes (seven red, six white).
- 15. The fifty stars are for the fifty states in the United States, and the thirteen stripes are for the first thirteen states. The flag has changed many times, (every time a new state joined the USA) but the flag which you can see today goes back to the Fourth of July 1960. Independence Day usually ends with lots of fireworks. It is like one big party.
- 16. Hallowe’en The pagans who lived in Britain two thousand years ago celebrated their New Year on 1 November. Then the Christians came and people celebrated ‘Hallowmas’, a three-day festival between 31 October and 2 November. 31 October was called All Hallow’s Eve, and slowly the name changed to Hollowe’en.
- 17. In November, winter is near, and hundreds of years ago people believed that bad spirits. Like ghosts, came in the winter. They wanted the bad spirits to go away, so they made fires outside and used big autumn fruit or vegetables to make jack o’lanterns. A jack o’lantern
- 18. The name ‘jack o’lantern’ means ‘Jack of the lantern’. A lantern is a kind of light, and some people think Jack was a nightwatchman who had one of these lights. To make a jack o’lantern, people cut a hole in a large fruit-usually a pumpkin. Then they put a candle in the hole, and cut a face in the side so the light was easy to see. Another thing people did, to make the bad spirits go away, was to dress like witches and ghosts.
- 19. Children still do this if they go to Hallowe’en parties. People often put up decorations for Hollowe’en parties, and play games. The decorations are usually black (for dark nights and death) and orange (for the autumn vegetables). One Hallowe’en party game is called ‘bobbing for apples’. Many apples fall off the trees in October so they are easy to find.
- 20. Someone puts water and apples in a big bowl. The apples stay on top of the water. Often someone puts something round the first player’s head so they cannot see. The player must keep their hands behind their back and take an apple out of the water with their teeth. Then the next player tries. The game is sometimes very difficult and players usually get very wet. In Canada and the USA, and sometimes in Britain, children go ‘trick or treating’.
- 21. They dress like witches and ghosts, and go to the houses around where they live, often in a small group. When someone answers the door, the children say: ‘Trick or treat?’ This means that the person in the house must decide. Either they give the children a treat (like fruit or chocolate) or the children will play a trick on them. For a trick the children sometimes throw something like an egg at the house.
- 22. Bobbing for apples ‘Trick or treat?’