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5. Usually New Year’s Trees (to decorate) with toys and coloured lights.

Ex.3 Answer the questions:

1.Are holidays popular in the UK?

2.Why do kids like holidays?

Ex.4 Insert the prepositions:

1.Christmas is celebrated … the 25th … December.

2.There’re always a lot of greeting postcards … sale.

3.Many families decorate their houses … brightly-coloured paper.

4.Children leave a long stocking … the end of their bed … Christmas Eve, hoping that Father Christmas will come … night and bring them small presents.

5.… Christmas Day, usually … afternoon people watch the Queen … television as she delivers her traditional Christmas message … the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth.

Ex.5 Complete the sentences:

1.Every nation of the world … .

2.The most popular holidays in the UK are … .

3.On Hallowe’en children, dressed in white sheets knock on doors and ask if you would give them a “treat”, or if you wouldn’t they … .

4.At 12 o’clock the New Year comes and everyone hopes that it will be better than the last one and children believe that … .

5.Though Easter is not an official holiday, many companies however … .

Ex.6 Make up a brief rendering of the text “British Favourite Holidays”. What holidays do you usually celebrate in your country in your family?

Traditions and Customs

Learn the pronunciation:

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There is no other nation that clings to the past with the tenacity of the British.

The Briton has a sense of the continuity of history. He loves to go through his ancient ceremonies as he has always performed them, with the consciousness that he is keeping faith with his ancestors, that he is maintaining the community they created.

Queen Elizabeth the First provided one of these examples of discarding the old and supplanting it with the new.

Even the casual visitor to London can view without efforts many of the brilliant parades and spectacles in which the colour of medieval times has been preserved for ours.

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. Flowershows 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.