Gardening

Most English people love gardens, their own above all, and this is probably one reason why so many people prefer to live in houses rather than flats.

Each house is surrounded by a great variety of flowers and shrubs.

Although the task of keeping a garden is so individual for many people gardening is the foundation of social and competitive relationships. Flower-shows and vegetable-shows, with prizes for the best exhibits, are very popular.

Wedding Superstitions

In England the wedding preparations, ceremony and feast have all become loaded with ritual practices.

The choice of date is important. May is traditionally unlucky for weddings.

The tradition that the bride’s parents should pay for the wedding dates back from two or three centuries ago. At most formal wedding brides skill get married in white. Even a modern bride will observe the taboos about wearing her dress before the ceremony.

The groom musn’t see her in it until she enters the church. The veil should be put on. It’s a lucky omen if the bride should see a chimney sweep on her way to church.

After the ceremony, the couple are showered with the confetti. After that the bride opens the feast. She has to cut the wedding cake, which symbolizes a fruitful marriage.

Fireplaces

In English homes, the fireplace has always been, until recent times, the natural centre of interest in a room. People may like to sit at a window on a summer day, but for many months of the year they prefer to sit round the fire and watch the dancing flames.

In the Middle Ages the fireplaces in the halls of large castles were very wide. Only wood was burnt, even large logs.

Such wide fireplaces may still be seen in old inns.

Elizabethan fireplaces often had carved stone or wood work over the fireplace, reaching to the ceiling.

When coal fires became common, fireplaces became much smaller.

Dancing

Dancing is so popular that the numerous public halls are an important element in the folklore procedures of the upper and middle classes. They manage to survive against the competition of the more modern noisier discotheques. Public dance-halls are strictly places for dancing, with good floors and good bands, but often no tables for people to sit at when they are not actually dancing, only rows of chairs round the walls. They are visited mainly by young unmarried people. Girls tend to go in groups of two or three, friends from the same street or the same office; the young men sometimes go in groups too, but often alone. All the girls tend to get together between dances, and the young men similarly. At the beginning of each dance a man chooses a girl from the mass, and will ask the same girl to dance with him again if he finds her company agreeable, but the girl may refuse. Most of the dancers go home as they come-but not quite at all. If a couple like one another the young man may offer an invitation to go to a cinema on some future day and meet again. Young people find that easy enough to make friends.