Fun English Lessons

Phrases and Vocabulary used:

1. Belated - Merry belated Christmas. Happy belated birthday.

2. Happy holidays vs Merry Christmas - Although Christmas is popular throughout the world, it is really a Christian holiday. Many people of other faiths don’t celebrate Christmas but instead celebrate their own holidays. Jewish people for example celebrate Hanuka instead of Christmas. If you are unsure of someone’s religious background, you can wish them a happy holidays instead of saying Merry Christmas.

3. If you see someone before Christmas but you think that you won’t see them again until after Christmas you can say, "If I don’t see you before, have a Merry Christmas and a happy new year." If you see the person all the time, we usually only say "Merry Christmas" on Christmas day, December 25.

4. Don’t say "Happy Christmas". Native speakers don’t say that.

5. "Secret Santa" -This is a kind of fun gift giving game. People in groups like close friends, office workers in a company, or people on the same sports team might choose to do a secret santa. The way it works is to put everyone’s name on a small piece of paper and then put it into a hat. Then each person chooses one name from the hat. Then the person must buy a gift for the person whose name they selected. This is a secret so you aren’t supposed to tell anyone who you are buying a gift for. This game often has a price limit. For example the rule might be that your gift must be between 15 and 20 dollars. On Christmas day, or whenever the Christmas party is, everyone exchanges their gifts.

6. "Gag gift" - Sometimes for fun people buy each other gag gifts. A gag gift is a gift that is just supposed to be funny but usually isn’t very useful. One example of a "gag gift" is to buy a hair brush for a person with no hair.

7. When Add and I were young, we found it really hard to sleep on Christmas eve because we were so excited about Christmas day. We would always get up really early to open our stocking. [A stocking is like a big sock that Santa Clause puts gifts in]. Our parents let us open the stocking before they woke up. When our parents woke up, which was usually around 8 in the morning, we would all go downstairs and sit around under the Christmas tree in the living room and exchange gifts. We believed that Santa was bringing all the gifts when we were young. Our mom liked those years the best, so even after we found out it was our parents who put the gifts under the tree, our mom still wrote on the gift tag, "To Andrew love Santa". After we exchanged all the gifts, we went first to our mom’s parents house for dinner. Everyone on my mom’s side of the family would go there. [ie. her brothers and sisters along with their children]. We would eat and again exchange gifts. After that we would go to my dad’s parents house and do the same thing with his side of the family. It was quite easy to do because he and my mom went to the same highschool, so their parents lived very close together.

8. Boxing day sales - Boxing day is on December 26. Most people are off work at that time. It is a great day to go shopping because many stores have a lot of goods that didn’t sell for Christmas, so they offer a lot of great discounts. You can often get 50% off on many things if you wait until boxing day to buy them.

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