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Chapter 4: A modern, thriving society

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Customs and traditions

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Customs and Traditions: From Bonfire Night to Christmas

Every year on the night of 5 November, the bang of fireworks fills parks and back gardens all over Britain. People crowd round huge bonfires to keep warm, and in some places a straw dummy is thrown onto the flames. What they are remembering is an explosion that never happened, more than four hundred years ago.

The British year is full of special days. There are Christian festivals such as Christmas and Easter; Hindu, Sikh, Jewish and Muslim festivals; traditions like Halloween and April Fool's Day that have nothing to do with religion; and a handful of bank holidays. This chapter covers the handbook's section on Customs and traditions in chapter 4. Let's start with a picture of the whole year:

Christmas and Boxing Day

On 25 December, Christmas Day marks the birth of Jesus Christ, and everyone gets the day off as a public holiday. Lots of Christians attend a church service on Christmas Eve (24 December) or on the day itself.

Christmas in Britain is very traditional. Most families stay at home and sit down to a special meal, often with roast turkey, Christmas pudding and mince pies. People give presents, send Christmas cards and decorate their homes, and many put up a Christmas tree indoors and decorate it.

Some of these traditions are younger, or older, than they look. The Christmas tree is a German custom: as early as 1800, Queen Charlotte, the German wife of George III, had one at Windsor. What really made it catch on was the 1848 engraving below. When people saw Queen Victoria and her German-born husband, Prince Albert, celebrating round a tree with their children, they wanted one too. Mince pies, meanwhile, really did contain meat in the past; today the filling is mostly dried fruit, such as raisins, mixed with spices.

For children, Christmas is the most exciting day of the year. The youngest ones believe that Father Christmas, also called Santa Claus, comes in the night before Christmas Day and leaves them presents.

The next day, 26 December, is Boxing Day, and it is also a public holiday.

Despite the name, Boxing Day has nothing to do with the sport. The name is usually thought to come from the "Christmas box": in the past, on the day after Christmas, employers gave servants and delivery workers a box with money or a gift inside. But nobody is completely sure where the name comes from.

Easter and Lent: pancakes, ashes and chocolate eggs

Easter comes in March or April. It remembers Jesus dying on Good Friday and coming back to life on Easter Sunday. Good Friday and Easter Monday, the day after Easter Sunday, are both public holidays.

Why does the date move? The Church's rule is that Easter Sunday is the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after 21 March, so it can fall on any date from 22 March to 25 April.

The 40 days before Easter are called Lent. For Christians it's a time to think about their lives and get ready for Easter. In the past people fasted (ate very little) during Lent. Today many people give up just one thing instead, such as a food they love.

The day before Lent is Shrove Tuesday, also known as Pancake Day. People eat pancakes because, long ago, making them was a way to finish the eggs, fat and milk in the house before the fast. Lent starts the next day, on Ash Wednesday. At church that day, Christians receive a cross drawn in ash on their forehead, a sign of death and of being sorry for their sins.

Some towns turn Pancake Day into a race. The pancake race in Olney, a town in Buckinghamshire, is said to date back to 1445: the story goes that one Shrove Tuesday a housewife heard the church bell and ran all the way to church still holding her frying pan, pancake and all. It's only a local legend, and no records from the time prove it.

1. TueShrove Tuesday (Pancake Day): the day before Lent; time for pancakes
2. WedAsh Wednesday: Lent begins; an ash cross on the forehead
3. 40 daysLent: a time to reflect and prepare; people used to fast, and now many give one thing up
4. 3 weeksMothering Sunday: the Sunday three weeks before Easter
5. FriGood Friday: remembers Jesus's death; a public holiday
6. SunEaster Sunday: celebrates Jesus rising from the dead
7. MonEaster Monday: a public holiday

People who aren't religious celebrate Easter too. The favourite part for many is Easter eggs: eggs made of chocolate that people give each other, as a sign of new life.

Festivals of other faiths

People of many faiths live in the UK, and five festivals from other religions are worth knowing:

Diwali
Hindu and Sikh

Hannukah
Jewish

Eid al-Fitr
Muslim

Eid ul Adha
Muslim

Vaisakhi
Sikh

• Diwali usually comes in October or November and goes on for five days. People often call it the Festival of Lights. It is a festival for both Hindus and Sikhs, and it celebrates good winning over evil and gaining knowledge. There are several different stories about how it began. Leicester, in the English Midlands, is known for its big Diwali celebration.
• Hannukah is in November or December and lasts eight days. It remembers the Jewish people's struggle for religious freedom. Each day of the festival, people light one more candle on a menorah, a candle stand with places for eight candles. This recalls an old story in which lamp oil that should have run out after one day kept burning for eight.
• Eid al-Fitr marks the end of Ramadan, a month in which Muslims fast. Muslims thank Allah for helping them to keep the fast. The date is different every year, and people go to special prayers and share special meals.
• Eid ul Adha recalls how the prophet Ibrahim was prepared to give up his son as a sacrifice because God commanded it. The festival reminds Muslims how devoted they should be to God. Many Muslims kill an animal to eat during the festival, and the law in Britain says this must be done in a slaughterhouse.
• Vaisakhi (sometimes spelled Baisakhi) is a Sikh festival. It celebrates how the Sikh community called the Khalsa was founded. It falls on 14 April every year, with parades, dancing and singing.

Both Diwali and Hannukah involve lights, oil lamps for one and candles for the other, and in everyday English Hannukah is sometimes called a festival of lights too. But the name "Festival of Lights" usually means Diwali. Leicester first put up Diwali lights on Belgrave Road in 1983, and today its celebration draws tens of thousands of people and is often said to be one of the biggest outside India. The Sikh Khalsa was founded in 1699 by the tenth Sikh Guru, Guru Gobind Singh. And because the Islamic calendar has about 11 fewer days than the calendar used in the UK, Eid al-Fitr and Eid ul Adha come round about 11 days earlier each year.

New Year, Valentine's Day, April Fool's Day and days for parents

New Year's Day, 1 January, is a public holiday. Most of the partying happens the night before, on New Year's Eve (31 December). The Scots have their own name for 31 December, Hogmanay, and in Scotland 2 January is a public holiday as well. For some Scots, Hogmanay matters even more than Christmas.

There is a reason for that. After the Reformation, Scotland's Presbyterian Church thought Christmas was too "Catholic" and for hundreds of years discouraged people from celebrating it. Christmas Day only became a public holiday in Scotland in 1958, so the big celebrations moved to New Year's Eve. At midnight people join hands and sing Auld Lang Syne, the song by the poet Robert Burns, and the first visitor to step into a home in the new year is said to decide the family's luck for the whole year.

On Valentine's Day, 14 February, couples give each other cards and presents. Sometimes people send a card without signing it to someone they secretly like.

On April Fool's Day, 1 April, people play tricks on each other, but only until midday. TV programmes and newspapers often run made-up April Fool stories as well.

The most famous of these is still the BBC's. On 1 April 1957 its news programme Panorama showed a film of a Swiss family picking spaghetti from trees, and quite a few viewers phoned in to ask how they could grow their own.

Mothering Sunday, also called Mother's Day, falls three weeks before Easter Sunday. Children send their mothers a card or buy them a present. Fathers get their turn on Father's Day, the third Sunday in June.

Watch out if you come from the USA or many other countries, where Mother's Day is the second Sunday in May. In the UK, Mothering Sunday moves with Easter, so it usually falls in March.

Three autumn dates: Halloween, Bonfire Night and Remembrance Day

31 October: Halloween

Halloween is a very old festival. It grew out of a pagan festival (from before Christianity) held at the start of winter. Young people often dress up in scary costumes and go from door to door for trick or treat: people hand out sweets (treats) so that the children won't play tricks on them. Many people also hollow out a pumpkin, carve a face in it to make a lantern, and put a candle inside.

The pumpkin lantern used to be a turnip lantern. In Scotland and Ireland, people hollowed out turnips and carved them into lanterns. Emigrants took the custom to America, where they switched to pumpkins, which are much easier to carve, and the pumpkin version later came back across the Atlantic to Britain.

5 November: Bonfire Night

On Bonfire Night (also called Guy Fawkes Night), people across Great Britain let off fireworks in their gardens or go to see big public displays. It all goes back to 1605. That year Guy Fawkes and a group of other Catholics plotted to blow up the Houses of Parliament and kill the Protestant king. Their plan failed. The king was James I, whom you met in The Stuarts.

The straw figure burned on the bonfire stands for Guy Fawkes and is called a "guy", and the everyday English word "guy", meaning a man, is said to come from it. British children grow up with a rhyme that begins "Remember, remember the fifth of November". Even today, before the monarch opens a new session of Parliament, guards with lanterns search the cellars of the Houses of Parliament in case anyone has hidden explosives there again, though these days it is mainly a tradition.

11 November: Remembrance Day

Remembrance Day honours the men and women who were killed fighting on the side of the UK and its allies. At first it was a day to remember those who died in the First World War, which came to an end on 11 November 1918. People wear a poppy, the red flower that grew all over the battlefields in that war. Everyone stops for a two-minute silence at 11 am, and wreaths of poppies are placed at the Cenotaph, the war memorial in Whitehall in London.

The poppy became a symbol of remembrance through a poem. In 1915 John McCrae, a Canadian army doctor, wrote In Flanders Fields on the battlefield in Belgium, describing red poppies blooming among the graves. The Royal British Legion has sold poppies to raise money since 1921. Look closely and you'll see that Scottish poppies are different from English ones: they have four petals and no leaf.

Bank holidays: days off with no religious meaning

On top of the festivals above, the UK has several other days off each year, known as bank holidays. On these days banks and lots of other businesses close. Bank holidays have no religious meaning. They fall:

• at the start of May
• at the end of May or start of June
• in August

Northern Ireland has an extra public holiday in July to remember the Battle of the Boyne. In that battle, in 1690, William III defeated James II; see The Stuarts.

Bank holidays themselves began with the Bank Holidays Act 1871, introduced by Sir John Lubbock, a banker and Member of Parliament. People were so grateful that for a while they called bank holidays "St Lubbock's Days".

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