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English Vocabulary for Christmas

familia inglesa celebrando las navidades

Here is some English vocabulary related to the Christmas holidays!
VOCABULARIO EN INGLÉS PARA LA NAVIDAD

DAYS OF THE CHRISTMAS SEASON

24 December = Christmas Eve.

“Eve” is a very old word which means “the day before”. This day is literally the day before Christmas.

25 December = Christmas or Christmas day

Christmas day in the US is one of the most important holidays of the year, along with Thanksgiving. For many Christians it has great religious significance and it is customary to attend midnight mass, but for many it is a secular holiday where we get together with family and friends for eating, partying and gift giving. The Christmas season has become a huge shopping spree, fuelled by shops and all kinds of businesses looking to end the year with good sales.

Hanukkah = The Jewish winter festivity falls at the same dates as the Christmas season. It’s an 8 day celebration also called the Festival of Lights. The date is not fixed so the holiday can start any time from the end of November to the end of December, depending on the year.

31 December = New Year’s Eve. Notice the use of “Eve” again to mean “the day before”. It’s the day before the new year. At midnight many people gather in Times Square in New York to watch the ball fall to mark the exact moment we leave one year and enter the next. (Or they watch it on TV!) Kissing, hugging and toasting at 12 o’clock. But many people have to work the next day, so they go home early.

1 January = New Year’s Day. Like Thanksgiving, it’s a day for watching football! It marks the end of the Christmas season, also called Yuletide.

WHAT’S TYPICAL AT CHRISTMAS?

Christmas presents of course!

Christmas decorations: In the US many people decorate their homes with colored Christmas lights, inside and out, put up a Christmas tree covered in colored decorations and more lights, decorate their windows, their table, everything! It’s an explosion of color, especially green and red, the most traditional colors.

Christmas cards: We still send family and friends a Chrstmas card before Christmas day, especially to the people we don’t want to lose contact with, but we don’t see or have the opportunity to see during the rest of the year. Many families write a letter with their news from the whole year, print it at home and include it in each card. The use of paper cards is becoming less frequent with the rise of e-cards: fast and free!

Christmas tree, of course!

Christmas carols: Traditional songs we sing at this time of the year. “Traditional” could mean songs that are hundred of years old, but we also have “traditional” rock and roll songs, pop songs, country and western, blues and whatever! Want to hear some? Click here CLICK for Christmas carols!

Christmas Carols

Manger scene, also called Nativity Scene

The three wise men: Balthasar, Melchior and Gaspar

Holly

ENGLISH LANGUAGE TIPS FOR CHRISTMAS

What we say at Christmas:

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

What did you get for Christmas?
What are you doing at Christmas?
How was your Christmas?

What we write in the cards we send

Many happy returns!

Seasons Greetings!

CHRISTMAS VOCABULARY FALSE FRIENDS:

fireplace or chimney?!

fireplace

chimney

HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM LINGUASUITE!!

click here for the best christmas present

The shortest day, the longest night!

This week Saturday perhaps can be considered as one of our holdays — it’s the winter solstice. Or equinox?! Which is which? Pay attention now, here goes. Let’s learn some vocabulary and then see a video.

Equinox is like “equal”; day and night are the same length. So that’s not it, is it? Must be solstice, then. The shortest day (or the longest night)of the year is on or around the 21st of December.

I’ve heard some people say the shortest day is Santa Lucia, on the 13th. So which one is it? You can’t have the shortest day on two days!

It turns out both are correct. The 13th was the date of the winter solstice in the old Julian calendar; the 21st in the Gregorian calendar commonly used today by most countries.

So in most places in the Northern Hemisphere it’s pretty cold at this time of year. We’re getting ready for Christmas or Hanukkah, or New Year’s, and thinking that the car feels like the North Pole when we get in it in the morning to go to work.

What does all this have to do with the picture at the beginning of the post? Well, following along these season lines, we’ve chosen a video about the North Pole for this week.

Enjoy the music, read the facts and pay attention to the picture to help you understand and remember some new vocabulary.

VOCABULARIO EN INGLÉS
Here are some of the words you will see in the video:

Frozen solid = an expression we use to mean really, really frozen. My feet are frozen solid!
10 feet thick = Thick tells you the espesor. 10 feet is about 305 centimeters
Sheet = a material that is thin and large is a sheet. A sheet of paper. A sheet of ice on the street.
32º F This is the temperature that water freezes at.
Sunrise = the moment when you first see the sun in the morning when it comes over the horizon.
Sunset = The last moment you see the sun before it goes below the horizon.
A mile is about 1.6 kilometers
Zip code = Post code in the US
Find their way = arrive
A sled = a land vehicle you can use to go down a hill on the snow. Traditionally made of wood, today there are high performance, extreme sleds on the market.
Icebreakers = here, big ships that break the arctic ice. In a conversation, an icebreaker is what you say to start the conversation when people don’t know each other.
Brave = if you are not afraid, you are brave.

Vídeo para aprender inglés click!

los vídeos para aprender inglés de LinguaSuite

Got those presents picked out yet?

Black Friday

Today is BLACK FRIDAY. What’s that? Something scary? Something dreadful? The end of the world?

Noooo! It’s the first big shopping day (NO! EVENT!) at the beginning of the Christmas shopping season in the USA and Canada. It is sooo big!

So why BLACK? Because it’s the day the shops make profits! They are not IN THE RED (debt). They are IN THE BLACK (profit)!!

Notice today’s expressions …

To be in the red
To be in the black
Profits (not benefits!)

Where does Thanksgiving come from?

mazorca de maíz para celebrar el día de acción de gracias

In the last post we talked about what Americans do on Thansgiving Day. Thanksgiving Day in the USA

But where does Thanksgiving come from? Disney Factory? Hollywood? No!

The modern Thanksgiving holiday tradition comes from a celebration in 1621 in Plymouth Massachusettes.

We celebrate the feast between the Pilgrims, religious separatists from England, and the Wampanoag Indians who had taught them how to grow corn (like in the picture). The feast and thanksgiving was to celebrate their harvest good enough to guarantee survival through the winter to come.

Not all historians think this version is true, but it’s good enough for most people. Except many native Americans, of course, some of whom understandably protest at Plymouth Rock every year.

School children dress up as Pilgrims and Indians, paint pictures of the first Thanksgiving Day, and put on a show for the parents.

And the President pardons the life of one lucky turkey. No joke!

And here’s the video of the Macy’s missing in the last post. Oops! Macy’s Parade

What do people do on Thanksgiving Day?

Today is Thanksgiving Day in the US. Because it’s the 28th of November? No! because it’s the fourth Thursday in November. The date changes every year.

What do Americans do on Thanksgiving day?

Watch the Macy’s parade. On TV. If you are or have kids. This traditional parade on Thanksgiving Day, in New York, is sponsored by the big department store Macy’s. Huge inflated balloons. Described as “an unbelievable experience”.

Cook. A lot. Not only turkey, but pie, cake, vegetables, sweet potatoes and a very large turkey. Thanksgiving = Turkey. Also pumpkin.

For some people this is fun. For other people it is maximum stress. Newspapers and magazines will have already devoted pages on recipes and tips on how to survive in the kitchen.

Eat turkey. A lot. In the middle of the day, which is strange for us. Usually with your whole family, wherever they normally live. Planes, freeways and buses all busy carrying people from East to West and West to East. Also North and South. Many people start the meal with a prayer. Many people in the US do that every day any way. Other people don’t.

Watch football on TV.

Eat more. And drink.

Get ready for tomorrow, Black Friday.