English customs and traditions

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English customs and traditions.

Нельга Инна Григорьевна,

Учитель английского языка

МОУ СОШ №36

S peaking about old English customs and habits I can’t but mention in the first place those that are kept in Parliament. They have a long history and some of them look rather funny nowadays.

The House of Parliament is the seat of the British Government. There is only one building there but it is called “the Houses” because it is divided into two chambers – the House of Commons and the House of Lords.

The Lord Chancellor, chairman of the House of Lords, still sits on a large sack of wool covered with a red cloth. Many, many years ago, when wool was the main product of England, it naturally was the symbol of the country’s power. Today the Woolsack is a mere tradition.

Many traditions are found in the House of Commons. When its new chairman, the Speaker, is elected, he is dragged to his chair putting up a show of resistance. This custom dates from the times when it was dangerous to be the Speaker. Now take the voting procedure in the House of Commons. After the discussion of a bill the Speaker asks if it has the approval of the House. In case the approval is not unanimous some of the members shout “Aye” (which is derived from the old French word meaning “yes” and others shout “no”). Then the Speaker “calls for division”, or in other words, puts the bill to the vote. This is called division since the voting is done by dividing: the members leave their seats and pass into the corridors through different doors, to show which way they are voting. The votes are counted as the members go through.

And here is another Parliament tradition. In the House of Commons there are benches and not separate seats as in most European parliaments. The first strange thing about those benches is that they don’t provide seat for all 630 members of the House, but only for the two-thirds of their member. So, in case all the MP’s appear at the session there won’t be enough room for sitting. The second thing is that the rows of benches face each other while the Speaker’s chair is in the centre of the House, between those rows of benches.

The front benches on the Speaker’s right are for the members of the Government, the front benches on his left are for the leaders of the Opposition. The back benches are occupied by the ordinary members who are called “back-benchers”.

These traditions of Parliament as well as many other England’s customs and habits do not change.

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What is a bank holiday? It is one of six days in England (not Sundays) on which all banks are closed and which are usually holidays for schools-offices, etc. One of such holidays is Christmas Day (December 25-th).

Many people look on Christmas as the time to celebrate the birth of Christ but really the celebrations go back to the earliest of times.

In those days the sun meant so much to primitive man that when in began to go lower each day till December 23 people worried for they thought the sun was dying out. They watched the sun and ate less keeping the food for the next year. On December, 23 as indeed it does now, the sun stayed longer in the sky and gradually the days become longer and the nights shorter. When this happened the primitive man was very happy. He even felt he wanted to celebrate it. Now he could eat more – he was not afraid for his future any longer. It was wonderful.

Gradually man began to understand the material nature of the sun. But it became a tradition to celebrate at the end of December with presents and merry-making and plenty of eating and drinking. These celebrations are now called Christmas.

Some of the Christmas customs are or were the same in different countries. In old England children wearing all sorts of costumes walked along the streets at Christmas time singing and dancing and sometimes even giving little plays. For this people asked them into their homes and gave them plenty of sweet things. This is very much like the old Ukrainian custom.

It is a custom in England for everybody to send Christmas cards to their friends just before Christmas. There is usually a pretty picture of some kind on the card, and a few wards such as “Best wishes for a happy Christmas” or simple “A merry Christmas”.

There are also special cards for the New Year, but in England usually only those people send them who have forgotten to send a Christmas card.

It is also a custom in England to give friends and relations presents in the day after Christmas Day. This day is called Boxing Day because at one time the presents were in boxes. Boxing Day is the first week-day after Christmas Day, which means that if Christmas Day is a Saturday, Boxing Day is on December 27-th.

Two of the bank holidays fall on Easter. Easter is a spring holiday. It does not come on the same days every year, but some time in March or April. Most schools in England close for a week or two, and many shops and offices close for four days. Good Friday, Easter Saturday, Easter Sunday and Easter Monday of these Good Friday and Easter Monday are bank holidays.

The other two bank holidays are Whit Sunday, seven weeks after Easter and the first Monday in August.

The 31^st of December is the last day of the year. On this day we see the old year out and the new year in. At night, when the clock in the Kremlin tower strikes twelve, all the Soviet people raise their glasses and say to one another “A Happy New Year to you”.

More than two centuries ago friends did not meet on the last night of December to see the New Year in. The 31^st day of the month was spent by the Russian people in the same way as any other winter day. The 1^st of January was not a holiday at that time. The first day of the year was the 1^st of September.

So it went on till 1699 when Peter the Great put an end to the old tradition. In 1699 the 31^st of December was pronounced the last day of the year. It was the last day of the year in Europe. The first day of January seventeen hundred was the beginning of the new Russian calendar.

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English people drink a lot of tea. Some English people have tea for breakfast, tea in the middle of the morning, tea after dinner, tea in the middle of the afternoon, tea at tea-time and tea with supper.

At work they take five or ten minutes in the middle of the morning and the afternoon to have a cup of tea.

At tea-time they have one, two, three or more cups of tea, bread and butter, or cakes. Some English families have “high tea” or “big tea” and so supper. For high tea they may have meat, bread and butter, cakes, and of course, a lot of tea.

The English always drink tea out of cups, never out of glasses.

In England they usually drink tea with sugar and milk. When you go to an English house for tea, the house-wife always asks you “How many lumps (pieces) of sugar do you take in your tea?” The answer is: “I take one lump (or two lumps)” or sometimes: “I don’t take any sugar”.

Tea with lemon in it is called “Russian tea” in England.

There is a story of an English sailor who brought home some tea leaves as a present for his mother. She told her friends about the present and asked them for dinner to try “tea”. When her friends came, the old woman brought in a plate and put on the table. There were brown leaves of tea on it. The leaves were boiled. Her friends began to eat these boiled leaves, of course nobody liked them. At that moment the sailor came in. He looked at the table and began to laugh: “Mother, what did you do with those tea leaves?” “I boiled them, as you told me to do.” “And what did you do with the water?” “I threw it away, of course,” – answered the poor woman. “Now you may throw the leaves away too”, – said her son.

Maybe this story is only a joke. But it shows that people in England at that time knew very little about tea and liked to tell jokes about it.

Englishmen always eat bread with their soup. With meat and vegetables they never eat any bread. Some Englishmen only eat one thin piece of bread at dinner.

On working days many English people have lunch at one o’clock instead of dinner. Lunch is usually cold, but some Englishmen have thin soup at lunch.

Many Englishmen eat porridge with milk for breakfast. English people often take sugar in their porridge. But porridge is a Scotch dish, and the Scotch always put salt in it, and never sugar.

The Earl of Sandwich was an Englishman who lived in the 18-th century. So fond was he of games of chance that he was known as the greatest gambler in London. Not only would he play all day but he would often continue playing all night, too. On one occasion, he remained at the card-table for twenty-four hours, and during this time the only food he had was some slices of meat and bread brought to him by his servant. Not wishing to stop playing even while he ate these, he put the meat between the bread and in this way was able to continue playing while eating.

So from the nave of this gambler comes the word “sandwich”.

For company and conversation the English go to the “pub”. In the cafes you can have only coffee, tea and “soft” drinks. You go to a café for a meal or for a quick cup of tea, but not sit and watch the world go by. When you want to rest after a day’s work, you go to the public house. Each public house has its own regular customers who go there every night to drink one or two pints of beer slowly and to play dominoes and so on.

There you may find every kind of person: doctors, school-teachers, workmen, in a village, the station-master and the village policeman.

Most pubs have a piano and on Saturday nights the customers often sit round it and sing. The people who want to sing ask one of the customers to play the piano. They buy drinks for as long as he plays. When he stops he becomes an ordinary customer again and must pay for his own beer.

In you go to the pub regularly the landlord will get to know you and will remember what you usually drink. Many landlords know their regular customers so well that even if you have been away from England for many years and then one day walk in, the land lord will come up to you and ask without showing surprise “The usual, sir?”

The pub is the place where you meet people. You get to know other “regulars” you buy drinks for them and they buy drinks for you, and you talk. You talk about the weather or how the English cricket players are doing in the match against Australia about football or Parliament. But the regulars who meet there almost every night for years never go into each other’s homes.

On Saturday people usually stay in the pub till closing time. In England the opening hours are fixed by law. Pubs open at ten in the morning and close at two o’clock. Then they open again at six and stay open until ten-thirty. At Easter, or Christmas or the New Year, the landlord may ask the authorities to keep open longer.

Many pubs are centuries old some are as much as seven hundred years old and were once inns.

The pub is friendly, warm and very typically English.

An Englishman’s day begins when he sits down to breakfast with his morning paper Breakfast is from any time until 9 o’clock, lunch between 12 and 2 p.m., tea at 4 o’clock and dinner between 7 and 9 p.m.

In the morning an Englishman has his favourite breakfast of cornflakes with milk and sugar or porridge followed by fried bacon and eggs. Then you drink tea or coffee with toast and marmalade which is a kind of an orange jam.

Then at mid-day everything is stopped for lunch. Most offices and small shops are closed for an hour, say from 1 till 2, and the city pavements are full of people on their way to cafes. Factory workers usually eat in their canteens.

The main meal of the day is called dinner. Dinner is eaten either in the middle of the day or in the evening. If in is eaten in the evening (about 7 o’clock) the midday meal is called lunch (about one o’clock). If dinner is in the middle of the day, the evening meal is called supper.

The usual mid-day meal consists of two courses. First a meat course is served with plenty of vegetables. It may be potatoes, peas, beans, cabbage. After it comes a sweet pudding or some stewed fruit.

Most Englishmen like what they call good plain food. Usually they have beefsteaks, chops, roast beef and fried fish and chips, Yorkshire pudding.

Those who eat at home usually call their mid-day meal dinner and make it the chief one of the day. It consists of three or four courses and is cooked by the mother of the family. The first course is soup. Then comes fish or meat served with various vegetables. Then the table is cleared and the dessert is brought on. This is jelly or fruit-apples, pears, oranges, plums and nuts.

Afternoon tea is taken at about five o’clock, but can hardly be called a meal. It is a cup of tea with bread and butter and cake or biscuits.

The evening meal, when all the family gather round the table after their working day, goes under various names-tea, high tea, dinner or supper (depending upon it’s size).

In the evening they have the much simpler supper – an omelette, or sausages, bacon or eggs, bread cheese, a cup of coffee or cocoa and fruit.

Адрес публикации: https://www.prodlenka.org/metodicheskie-razrabotki/492841-english-customs-and-traditions