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- Herausgeber: Books on Demand
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
Read a page of English every day in December! Learn about the history of Christmas, Christmas songs, British Christmas traditions, Christmas fairy tales, and do some puzzles. The book is written for English learners at CEFR level B1. Jeden Tag erfahren Sie etwas Interessantes über Weihnachten, über Historisches und britische Traditionen, lesen Sie Weihnachtsmärchen oder lösen Sie Rätsel. Das Buch eignet sich für Englischl Lernende auf dem Niveau GER B1.
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Seitenzahl: 65
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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CONTENTS
1. What is Advent?
2. Christmas Vocabulary
3. Evergreen
4. Midwinter Feasts
5. Elves and the Shoemaker by The Brothers Grimm
6. Saint Nicholas
7. Cancel Christmas!
8. Christmas Cards
9. Bah Humbug! A Victorian Christmas
10. Christmas Carols
11. The Twelve Days of Christmas
12. Poinsettia
13. Christmas Statistics
14. Pantomime – Christmas Entertainment
15. Christmas Food
16. Christmas Day Events
17. Christmas Craft: Christingle
18. Christmas Crackers
19. 1914 Christmas Truce
20. Good King Wenceslas
21. The Shortest Day
22. The Fir Tree by Hans Christian Andersen
23. Father Christmas and his Reindeer
24. Christmas Eve
Also by Sarah Curtius
Coming soon
Coming 2023
Acknowledgements
Welcome to this little book about Advent!
In this book, we are going to look at all sorts of things to do with the Advent and Christmas period:
the history of Christmas,
a few Christmas songs,
some British Christmas traditions
some Christmas fairy tales,
and a few Christmas puzzles.
I am British and the book looks mainly at British Christmas traditions. A traditional British Christmas is quite different to Christmas in Germany where I have lived for nearly 30 years. I hope you enjoy discovering things which are similar to your traditions, as well as those which are very different.
Some of the pages have QR codes and links which will take you to some extra content online.
Thank you for buying this book. I wish you happy reading and a lovely Advent!
Sarah Curtius
WHAT IS ADVENT?
1ST DECEMBER
It’s the first day of December! Have you opened the first door on your Advent calendar and enjoyed a piece of chocolate? Maybe someone has made you a calendar with small gifts for every day. Or maybe you made one for someone else. Let’s start our book by looking at some Advent traditions.
The word “Advent” comes from the Latin word adventus which means ‘coming’. In the Christian tradition, it is a time to think about Jesus’ birth but also his second coming in the future.
In the 6th century, fasting began after St Martin’s Day on 11th November. St Martin’s Day was celebrated by eating goose and other fatty foods. After that, monks fasted on weekdays until 6th January. This was sometimes called St Martin’s Lent because, like Lent, the period of fasting before Easter, people fasted for 40 days. Later, the Advent period was reduced to about four weeks, starting on the Sunday between 27th November and 3rd December.
In the Middle Ages, in the north of England, poor women travelled around the villages with a small box during Advent. If people paid half a penny, they could look inside the box to see two figures – Mary and Jesus. It was bad luck not to see inside one of these boxes before Christmas Eve.
The idea that Advent was a time of fasting continued. Bakers in Germany developed a recipe for this time of year. It was a dry bread called ‘stollen’, made of flour, yeast, oil and water. The bread was dry and tasteless. In the 15th century, the Prince Elector Ernst of Saxony, wrote to the Pope to ask for special permission to use butter in the stollen. Five popes refused before Pope Innocent VIII sent the famous “Butter Letter” to the prince! Finally, the Saxonian bakers could use butter in the recipe ... but only for the Prince Elector’s stollen! Everyone else had to pay a fine for eating butter during the time of fasting.
They have always loved their stollen in Saxony. In 1730, August II the Strong had a giant stollen baked. It weighed 1.7 tonnes and they had to build a special oven to bake it and a special knife to cut it. A copy of this knife, which is 1.6 metres long, is used to cut the stollen in the festival which still takes place at the Christmas Fair in Dresden. The biggest stollen ever made was not baked in Dresden, though. The over 72-metre-long cake was baked by Lidl in the Netherlands in 2010.
Like stollen, many of the Advent traditions we celebrate today come from Germany. The first Advent wreath was created for children at a mission school in north Germany in the 19th century. The children kept asking how long it was until Christmas so Pastor Johann Hinrich Wichern stuck 20 small candles and four big ones to a wooden wheel. The small candles were for the days and the big ones for the four Advent Sundays.
The first advent calendars were made in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. They had doors to open to show a small picture. The first chocolate calendars were made in the late 1950s. Now you can get Advent calendars with all sorts of things hiding behind the doors – gin, beer, perfume, Lego or other toys or even treats for your pet.
CHRISTMAS VOCABULARY
2ND DECEMBER
We are going to look at some of the vocabulary you need to talk about Christmas in English. The day that Christmas is celebrated in English-speaking countries is Christmas Day, 25th December. The day before is called Christmas Eve and the day afterwards is Boxing Day.
A week after Christmas, we celebrate the new year. People have parties on New Year’s Eve and wake up with a hangover on New Year’s Day! In Scotland, they call this holiday Hogmanay and both 1st and 2nd January are bank holidays.
In Advent, we hang up decorations or decorate the Christmas tree. On the tree, people hang baubles which are balls made of very thin glass. In the UK, you will often find people use tinsel for decoration. Tinsel is shiny strips all tied together to make a long rope. Another word we use at Christmas is trimmings. We trim the tree which means to decorate it but we also use the word trimmings for Christmas lunch. Turkey with all the trimmings means a dinner with turkey and all the other things, like vegetables, especially Brussels sprouts1 and sauces (more about food on December 15th).
In English-speaking countries, Father Christmas comes in the night of the 24th December. Some people call him Santa Claus. They may hang some stockings2 or socks at the end of their bed or on the chimney. Children are told that Father Christmas comes into the houses through the chimney. It’s amazing he does not make more of a mess in the house!
Father Christmas travels on a sleigh or sledge which is pulled by reindeer. Before Christmas, he is helped by elves. An elf is a small person with magical powers. In pictures they often have pointy ears.
Some families have a nativity scene3 which usually has Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus who lies in a manger4. The manger is the container which the animals eat from. The figures stand in a stable5, the building where animals are kept. The nativity scene may also include some shepherds and sheep and the Magi, sometimes called The Three Wise Men or The Three Kings.
In the UK, nativity plays are a very important tradition and you can often see them at schools and churches. The children play the roles of Mary and Joseph, the shepherds, the angels and the Wise Men, and sometimes also some sheep, cows and donkeys!
At Christmas, people wish each other a Merry Christmas or Happy Christmas. You may also see other greetings, especially in Christmas cards. Because not everyone celebrates Christmas as a Christian holiday, some people write Happy Holidays or Season’s Greetings.
