What is Christmas?
Tenía que escribir algo en inglés. Es muy útil para aprender y para reconocer lo poco que sabes, primero cuando te faltan las palabras para expresarte y después, cuando se lo pasas a alguien que de verdad “controle” para que te corrija y te devuelve un papel lleno de anotaciones en rojo. I apologize beforehand (pido disculpas de antemano) a los que no tengan ni idea de este topic y no lo vayan a entender y a los que sepan demasiado y les parezca muy elemental. Por supuesto ha sido escrito consultando el diccionario, ya que esto también me sirve a mí para aprender. Aquí va:
What is Christmas?
Christmas is just around the corner and last week I decided to find out what Christmas means. Firstly because I am very curious, but mainly to explain it to my kids. As usual, I headed to my phone and looked it up on the dictionary.com app. There I read something that I already knew. It said that “it’s an annual festival of the Christian church commemorating the birth of Jesus, celebrated on December 25th and now generally observed as a legal holiday and occasion for exchanging gifts”. After reading that, what I learnt was that it comes from the union of two words: Christ and mass. Well, it is said that we “learn something new everyday”.
So, so far we know that it used to be, and actually, it still is a Christian festival, but nowadays, it is celebrated by many people with different believes. For example, in Spain, where I live, we tend to confuse Christian with Catholic, however, recently I met someone that corrected me (live and learn) and taught me that the first term is much wider and people who do not follow “the Pope’s advice” also celebrate the birth of Jesus. In fact, even atheists celebrate it, but I suppose they do not think of God. Maybe they just think of Santa. And now I wonder, can you believe in God and not believe in Santa Claus, or vice versa? Anyway, that’s not the point, you can believe in whatever you want, or whatever you can.
As the dictionary definition for the word Christmas (Xmas for short) was not good enough for me, I had to resort to Google. There I came across a site where they recommended you to sit down with your children an tell them that «Christmas symbolizes peace, that is a time to celebrate with your family and friends, and that it is not only about receiving cool presents», and mentionined that there are people who are underprivileged and cannot provide extravagant gifts for their love ones.
Listening to some Christmas carols, I tried to follow this advice, but the kids were more interested in setting up the Christmas tree (with the Christmas decorations such as baubles, holly, tinsel, berries, fake candy canes and tiny empty gift boxes) and the nativity scene (with the star of Bethlehem, Joseph, Mary, baby Jesus, shepherds, angels, the mule, the ox, the manger,…). We set up both things and realized that one of the main figures, one of The Three Wise Men (or the Magi) was missing. We had Melchior with gold and Gaspar with frankincense, but not Balthazar, and of course no trace of the myrrh.
It is a good thing that we have a Chinese store near home, I thought, but later when we got there I was very disappointed to find that they don’t sell exactly the same figures as the one that we had lost. What a shame. What kind of store was this one where I couldn’t find any mistletoe or a single cracker?
On our way back home, a little frustrated, I tried to cheer them up talking about Father Christmas (or Santa, or Santa Claus, or Saint Nicholas, or Saint Nick) who was “coming to town” riding on a reindeer-pulled sleigh on Christmas Eve (the night before Christmas Day). “We’d better behave well or he will leave nothing near the fireplace, after coming down the chimney”, I said.
“Don’t worry daddy” someone answered. “We can wait until Twelfth Night. I am sure that at least one of The Two Wise Men will bring something for us”. The Two Wise Men? What happened to the third one? It is awesome how quickly the kids come to grips with the things they want and how easily they forgot about Christmas Spirit, peace, friendship, and that stuff…
And writing this I wonder: “Is this behaviour just common amongst children or is the same thing happening, more and more, to many of us?”.
Merry Christmas!!!
Vocabulario en mi quizlet por si alguien quiere escucharlo.
Suerte!!!
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