People in the UK are gearing up for two of the biggest national holidays of the year. Christmas and New Year are traditionally a time for family, friends, presents, and lots of good food! In this festive article Sarah Grieves looks at the language of festivities and celebrations using the Cambridge English Corpus.
Seasons’ Greetings
Should we say “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Christmas”? In the Cambridge English Corpus we can find lots of examples of both expressions. In British English, Merry Christmas is slightly more common than Happy Christmas, but both are frequently used. However, there’s a big difference in American English: Merry Christmas is over ten times as common as Happy Christmas!
Another way to wish people well at Christmas is to say “Happy Holidays”. This is four times more common in American English than British English. Based on language usage with Christmas, we might expect people to wish each other “Merry Holidays”, too. However, there are no examples of this expression being used in the entire Cambridge English Corpus. We only see results for Happy Holidays. So, if you’re learning American English, remember you can say “Merry Christmas” but only “Happy Holidays”.
We see a similar pattern for other celebrations: merry and happy can both pair with Christmas, but other celebrations only pair with happy.
Festive or festival?
The English words festival (noun) and festive (adjective) both come from the same Latin word: festa meaning feast. However, these two words have different associations in modern English. We can see this by looking at some of their common collocations (words which appear alongside them).
When we look at the word festive in the Cambridge English Corpus, the collocations often refer to Christmas specifically. For example:
The festive period: “Enjoy a splendid festive period and an angst-free new year.”
The festive season: “The week before Christmas, the SBO banned the use of intoxicating beverages during the festive season.”
A festive mood: “A selection of holiday tunes and encores, including “O Holy Night,” set a festive holiday mood.”
By contrast, here are some of the words associated with festival in the Cambridge English Corpus:
film
music
jazz
annual
literary
art
These are all different types of event that can take place. Unlike the adjective festive, the noun festival has a much broader application; it’s not used in reference to any particular place or date, and these festivals are not tied to any specific celebrations or holidays.
Festivities and Food
Festivities and celebrations all around the world often enjoy the sharing of food with family and friends – no surprise given the latin roots of the word festa. In fact, in the Cambridge English Corpus, the top nouns associated with the word celebration are dinner, banquet, feast, lunch and cake – food is clearly an important part of any celebration! At Christmas, people in the UK traditionally eat turkey. Some common expressions with turkey are:
roast turkey (the most common way of cooking turkey for Christmas)
turkey dinner (a meal of turkey, vegetables, traditional side dishes and sauces)
turkey and trimmings (same as the above)
leftover turkey (often a family will have too much turkey to eat at one meal)
turkey sandwiches (often made in the days following Christmas, using the leftover turkey)
However, even though turkey is widely eaten at Christmas in the UK, we have some evidence that not everyone actually enjoys it… Here’s an extract from a conversation about Christmas dinner collected as part of the Spoken British National Corpus project:
Speaker 1: cos she didn’t really like turkey
Speaker 2: cos no one really likes turkey
Speaker 1: then why do you bother?
Speaker 2: because it’s traditional
Why not ask your students about any special celebration food eaten in their countries. And if you’ve tried turkey, let us know in the comments whether you agree with the speaker above!
Ideas for teaching
Ask your students to think of an important time of celebration in their country, or a country they’ve visited. Ask them to make a word cloud of things connected to this festival. For a more structured task, give students some categories e.g. food, people, decorations or traditions. For a more challenging task, ask students to come up with different parts of speech e.g. nouns, verbs and adjectives associated with their celebration. Put students into groups and get them to present their celebration to a partner.
New Year is celebrated differently around the world. Put students into pairs and give each pair a country. Ask students to research how New Year is celebrated in that country. (They can use their phones or class computers for this task). Ask each pair to prepare three facts about New Year, and present these to the rest of the class. For a more structured task, give students some topics to research e.g. date, food, traditions or superstitions.
A tradition in the UK is to make ‘New Year’s resolutions’ (a commitment to doing or stopping doing something for the whole of the next year). Give students some examples of different New Year’s resolutions. Then ask students to choose a celebrity, and come up with a New Year’s resolution for that person. Put students into pairs, and get them to guess each other’s celebrity based on the resolution.
Watch out for more festive blog posts over the holiday season!