Welcome to English as a Second Language Podcast, number 112, Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa.
This is English as a Second Language Podcast, episode 112.
I'm your host, Dr Jeff McQuillan from the Center for Educational Development in beautiful Los Angeles, California.
Today's podcast is very appropriate.
It's called Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa.
Let's get started.
The holidays in my family are very diverse.
Our custom is to celebrate Christmas every year as a religious observance, complete with Advent wreaths and midnight mass.
Most of my in-laws observe Christmas purely as a secular holiday, with the focus on exchanging gifts stockings, a Christmas tree and other traditional customs.
There is a lot of listening to Christmas music.
My favorites are the carols sung by Nat King Cole, and sometimes even some eggnog.
My nieces and nephews enjoy the day the most, especially when they get to open the gifts under the tree from Santa Claus.
One of my brother-in-laws is Jewish, And so he celebrates Hanukkah, the festival of lights, when he lights a candle each of the eight nights on the menorah.
My niece gets a small gift each night of Hanukkah and, of course, spins the dreidel.
With both celebrations in the same family, we sometimes call it Chrismica.
But the holidays are no longer just Christmas and Hanukkah in the United States.
More recently, there are some people who celebrate a new holiday, Kwanzaa.
This is mostly an African-American event, with parades and other parties to highlight African-American heritage.
Started here in Los Angeles.
This celebration runs for one week after Christmas and is a mostly secular celebration.
Whatever tradition you celebrate, December is always a festive time of year.
Today we are talking about the holidays.
And when someone says, at least in the United States, the holidays with the definite article the, they're usually referring to Christmas, Hanukkah and possibly Kwanzaa.
These are December holidays, for the most part celebrated by different groups in the United States and, of course, all over the world.
The holidays I said in my family are very diverse, and to be diverse or diverse D I V E R S E means that there are many different types, many different varieties.
Our custom in the family where I grew up and a custom of course C-U-S-T-O-M is like a tradition.
Our custom is to celebrate Christmas as a religious observance.
A religious observance means that we celebrate it as a religious holiday.
So a religious observance could be a holiday.
It could be another religious event.
Part of the traditional religious observances of Christmas include Advent wreaths and Midnight Mass.
An Advent wreath.
Well, Advent capital A-D-V-E-N-T is the four-week period before Christmas which in some Christian churches is is celebrated as a special time of preparation.
Advent means the coming or to come.
And wreaths are circular, round pieces of usually some sort of parts of a tree or branches, green.
And the wreath has a place in it for four different candles, each candle representing one of the weeks before Christmas.
Midnight Mass.
A Mass capital M-A-S-S is a religious ceremony.
In the Catholic Church, as well as in some other churches, call their religious celebration a Mass.
Midnight Mass is, of course, Mass at midnight, the very first moment of Christmas.
And it is traditional in many churches in the United States and other places to have a mass at midnight with a full choir and so forth.
I said that many of my in-laws observe Christmas purely as a secular holiday.
In-laws...
I N hyphen L A W S refers to anyone that you are related to by marriage.
So my wife's mother is my mother-in-law.
My wife's brothers and sisters are my brothers and sisters-in-law.
The expression purely as a secular holiday, purely, P-U-R-E-L-Y, means solely or only.
Secular, S-E-C-U-L-A-R, means it's not religious.
So when someone talks about a secular event, they mean a non-religious event.
In a traditional secular Christmas there is, of course, exchanging of gifts and stockings and a Christmas tree.
To exchange gifts means you give me a gift and I give you a gift.
So we exchange.
Each person receives something.
Christmas stockings is also a very common custom in the United States.
Most of these customs come from Europe, particularly northern Europe.
And Christmas stockings are literally big socks that people either put on their fireplace, hang on their fireplace or put somewhere in the house.
And the idea is that you are supposed to put gifts inside of this big sock or stocking.
Stocking is just another word for a big sock.
A Christmas tree is, you I'm sure know, a large green tree that people decorate.
They put things on it, lights and what we call ornaments.
An ornament, O-R-N-A-M-E-N-T, is a decoration that you hang or put on a Christmas tree.
The Christmas music that I like to listen to are carols, and carols C-A-R-O-L-S is a Christmas song.
And my favorite singer of Christmas songs is Nat King Cole.
Nat King Cole C-O-L-E is a famous in the United States anyway, a famous singer from the 1940s and 50s.
He has a wonderful, deep voice.
So if you have a chance, try to listen to some songs sung by Nat King Cole.
One of the things that some families use to celebrate Christmas is eggnog.
Eggnog E-G-G-N-O-G is a drink that's made of eggs, and cream and usually a little alcohol, although you can have non-alcoholic eggnog eggnog without alcohol as well.
I said that my nieces and nephews enjoy this holiday because they get to open their gifts under the tree from Santa Claus.
It's traditional to put Christmas gifts underneath the Christmas tree and then either on Christmas Eve in some families or on Christmas morning, the 25th, we open up the gifts or the presents.
Santa Claus, of course, is the... mostly commercial symbol of Christmas.
And Santa Claus is supposed to go around and give gifts to all the good boys and girls in the world.
So hopefully you will get something from Santa Claus this year.
I mentioned that one of the other holidays we celebrate in December is called Hanukkah.
And Hanukkah, which can be spelled in English a couple of different ways, is a Jewish celebration.
It's sometimes called the Festival of Lights.
A festival is another word for a celebration, and it is a celebration, a commemoration, where The Jewish community remembers a famous event in Jewish history, and the celebration is usually observed by lighting a candle.
Each of eight nights.
So Hanukkah lasts or takes eight days.
It's an eight day celebration.
And each night of Hanukkah, you light another candle on what's called a menorah.
And a menorah, M-E-N-O-R-A-H, is a candlestick holder.
It's the name of the thing that you put the candles into to hold them.
My niece gets a gift every night of Hanukkah, and I said she, of course, spins the dreidel.
A dreidel, D-R-E-I-D-A-L, is a Yiddish word, a word from the Yiddish language.
Y-I-D-D-I-S-H.
And Yiddish was a language that was popular among Jews in Europe and is still spoken in parts of the United States where immigrants came speaking this language.
It's Yiddish is a combination of German with Hebrew and other language words as part of it.
And many Yiddish words are very well known to Americans, some very common words in Yiddish.
And someday we'll do a podcast about words in Yiddish in American English.
I mentioned that the dreidel, then, is something that my niece spins.
And another word for dreidel is a top, T-O-P.
And a top as a toy is something that you spin or you twist quickly and then it continues spinning on its own.
And it's a very popular toy among children, of course.
One of the terms that has been invented in the last few years to talk about the holidays, particularly in families where there is both a Christian and a Jewish member, is a term called Christmas, which is a combination of Christmas and Hanukkah.
Of course, it's not a real celebration.
It's sort of a joke word to talk about celebrating these two important holidays.
There is a new holiday relatively new holiday that is celebrated in some parts of the United States and that is called Kwanzaa.
K-W-A-N-Z-A-A is celebrated by many, or at least some, African Americans.
And African Americans or blacks the more common term now is African American have a celebration that begins the day after Christmas, December 26th, and continues on until for one week.
This is mostly a secular, non-religious celebration and it is a celebration of the African-American heritage or the history and the culture of the African-American people.
December 26th is the beginning of Kwanzaa.
December 26th is also called Boxing Day in Canada as well as in Great Britain.
It's not called Boxing Day in the United States, but if you live in Great Britain or in Canada, you will know that the day after Christmas is called Boxing Day.
And it is a public or national holiday in these countries.
I'm not exactly sure why it's called Boxing Day.
Some people think it's because the gifts were given the day after Christmas to the servants in a rich household.
The people who worked for them got their Christmas gifts in boxes. on the day after Christmas.
That's one theory.
Now let's listen to the story, this time at a native rate of speech.
The holidays in my family are very diverse.
Our custom is to celebrate Christmas every year as a religious observance, complete with Advent wreaths and midnight mass.
Most of my in-laws observe Christmas purely as a secular holiday, with the focus on exchanging gifts stockings, a Christmas tree and other traditional customs.
There is a lot of listening to Christmas music.
My favorites are the carols sung by Nat King Cole, and sometimes even some eggnog.
My nieces and nephews enjoy the day the most, especially when they get to open the gifts under the tree from Santa Claus.
One of my brother-in-laws is Jewish, and so he celebrates Hanukkah, the festival of lights, when he lights a candle each of the eight nights on the menorah.
My niece gets a small gift each night of Hanukkah and, of course, spins the dreidel.
With both celebrations in the same family, we sometimes call it Christmaka.
But the holidays are no longer just Christmas and Hanukkah in the United States.
More recently, there are some people who celebrate a new holiday, Kwanzaa.
This is a mostly African-American event, with parades and other parties to highlight African-American heritage.
Started here in Los Angeles.
This celebration runs for one week after Christmas and is a mostly secular celebration.
Whatever tradition you celebrate, December is always a festive time of year.
Well, whatever holiday you celebrate or don't celebrate, we want to wish you a good week.
So from Los Angeles, this is Jeff McQuillan.
We'll see you next year on ESL Podcast.
English as a Second Language Podcast is written and produced by Dr Lucy Say, hosted by Dr Jeff McQuillan.
This podcast is copyright 2006.
