December
24th - Christmas Eve - St. Nicholas visits every child on the night before Christmas.
The children hang stockings on the end of their beds or on the fireplace. Father
Christmas, as he is often called, fills them with toys.
Santa Claus -another name that he has- comes from Greenland in a sleigh pulled
by reindeer -he lands on the roofs of houses and comes down the chimney to bring
presents for the children. The children write letters to Santa Claus a few weeks
before Christmas and leave them in the fireplace.
Traditionally
people decorate their trees on Christmas Eve -December 24th-. They take down
the decorations twelve days later, on Twelfth Night. January 5th.) An older
tradition is Christmas mistletoe. People put a piece of this green plant with
its white berries over a door. Mistletoe brings good luck, people say.
In 1846 the first Christmas cards began in Britain. That was five years after
the first Christmas tree. At Christmas parties everybody has a cracker. Two
people pull the cracker and inside each cracker there is a small present, a
paper hat and a joke.
The day after Christmas is called Boxing Day. Traditionally boys from the shops
in each town asked for money at Christmas. They went from house to house on
December 26th and took boxes made of wood with them. At each huse people gave
them money. This was a Christmas present.
In many countries, people make New Year Resolutins on the evening of December
31st.
December
31st is called New Year's Eve and January 1st, which is a public holiday, is
New Year's Day. The Scots have another day por the New Year holiday -Hogmanay-
and in Scotland it is the most important holiay in the year.
On New Year's Eve, friends and relations meet and have parties to "see
the New Year in". They eat and drink and sometimes dance and sing. At midnight
they have a drink and wish each other "A happy New Year". Then they
sing "Auld Lang Syne" which is a song by the poet Robert Burns, in
Scottish dialect.
In Scotland, and in many parts of England, people visit their friends after
midnight -this is called "first-footing". If your first visitor after
twelve o'clock is a tall, dark man with a piece of coal and sometimes a herring
in his hand, you will be lucky for the whole year!
