http://www.australiaday.com.au/
January 8th, 2012.
Happy New Year to all my students!
I hope you had a wonderful rest, you really deserved it because most of you worked really hard.
So, in English culture we have what we call a "New Year's Resolution". Is there anything similar to this in Spain?
[I'm very sorry to say that an error occurred and I lost
all my page contents, fortunately I did not lose the comments, I will try to restore the contents some day?????]
8 comments:
Halloween is my favourite festivity of the year because I love costume partys. Every year I go to a Halloween party with my friends, last year we go to a "Zombie Walk", we disguise like real zombies and walk around Málaga with almost 1.000 people and it was terrific!
Halloween is different to Carnival because people go to Halloween as death, fear, night, ghost and all this stuff and in Carnival they go as whatever the want.
Excellent Sandra! I love Halloween, too. When I was a child in Vancouver I used to go trick or treating with my niece and nephew and my friends and neighbors. It was much safer back then. Nowadays, you have to be careful and stay within the limits of the people you know. When I was in Billings, Mt (USA) I went to a Halloween party, I hadn't been to one for many years, it was really cool. I loved it, so did my daughter, it was her first Halloween. We had so much fun dressing up, making up, deciding on the costume...
During my childhood, Halloween wasn't celebrated here in Spain as nowadays. The arrival of this celebration was later. I've never gone to a Halloween party. However, when my children were younger we bought a pumkin and hollowed it out to put a candle inside. Then on the night before All Saint's Day, they turned off the lights of the house and they appeared dressed up under the guise of what they occured wiht the pumkin in their hands. They enjoyed a lot with this short and quirky celebration.
As far as Carnival is concerned, it's celebrated just before Lent in the winter season. It lasts more than one day and it's more lively and bright as not all the fancy dresses are in connection with the after life, death ...
Great job Ana. It's interesting to see that people include new traditions in their lives. I believe observing, learning, discarding or incorporating are a few of the basics of evolution and change. I totally agree with you, Carnival is much livelier and some of the outfits are astounding. I recall there is specific music to go with the celebration and that it has political implications as well, am I right?
I didn't know until now that "Black Friday" is traditionally the beginning of the Christmas shopping season. It's curious! The crisis affect unfairly to some more than others. There're people who have a so cushy life that they hardly have noticed this bad patch and they even give themselves treats in their daily routine.
It seems that there's the "Cyber Black Friday" too, the online version of "Black Friday".
Here in Spain there isn't a fixed day to start buying presents for Christmas time, but if you go to the shopping malls especially at weekends almost all of them are bursting at the seams. Lately, we can see more and more shops that offer a percentage discount at this time of year.
Regarding the comments under the article ... variety is the spice of life. Some of them are funny, witty, ... anyway it's interesting to read different opinions of native people and while we improve our English.
Hi Ana,
Thanks for your comment. I totally agree with you, "it takes all sorts"! Enjoy your long weekend!
Veterans Day in the U.S, Remembrance Day in Canada and also known as Poppy Day or Armistice Day in The United Kingdom, is a memorial day observed in Commonwealth countries since the end of World War I and it is considered a national holiday in almost all of them. I didn't know the real meaning of the poppy, the symbol of remembrance, until now after having read that John McCrae, a doctor who worked with the Canadian Armed Forces wrote de poem "In Flandes Fields" after seeing the bloodiest fighting in Flandes where poppies flowered in the soil. It's supossed that the red colour is the symbol for the blood spilled in the War.
In Spain doesn't exist neither this Festivity nor the widespread national sense like in these countries. It's very different. Here military do their own celebrations to remember dead soldiers on active service but not on a fixed day. Last year for instance, I was present at a moving act in remembrance of people who had dead in The Civil War. It was put in the cemetery their names in tiles because many of them it is unknown the place where they are.
Thank you Ana for sharing your interesting views and information. I was in Washington in 2001 and visited the Memorial to the soldiers lost in Vietnam:
http://www.atpm.com/7.01/washington-dc/vietnam-memorial.shtml;
as well as the Korean War Memorial:
http://www.planetware.com/picture/washington-d-c-washington-korean-war-veterans-memorial-us-dc196.htm. They are two "living" commemorative places that chill your blood. There is such a feeling of sadness and pain there. One would think that humans would have reached the knowledge that killing is not the solution to our problems, don't you think? The thing is that Korea and Vietnam are recent, what is worse is that I had the same feeling of loss and pain when I visited the corridors of the amphitheatre in Italica (Seville):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italica.
That was ways back in Roman times and we ARE STILL FIGHTING!!! Isn't that sad...
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