Hi! Hoje falamos sobre algumas expressões comuns relacionadas a feriados aqui na Inglaterra (e no Reino Unido em geral!)
Transcrição
Hi! This is the new episode of the Inglês Online podcast.
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This is the last Inglês Online episode of 2015 (twenty fifteen) and I wanted to take the opportunity to tell you guys about a couple of expressions used by the Brits to refer to holidays. Let’s start with public holidays – what is a public holiday? It’s a day where most businesses and services are closed. Christmas and New Year’s Day are two examples.
So here in the UK people actually refer to public holidays simply as bank holidays – as you can guess, banks are closed on bank holidays. So we just had a bank holiday – Christmas, the 25th of December. Tomorrow, January 1st, we have another bank holiday – New Year’s Day.
So apparently there are about eight bank holidays a year in England – and I’m talking about just England now. Only three of those are public holidays in Brazil as well: the two I mentioned before, Christmas and New Year’s Day, and Good Friday, which is the Friday before Easter Sunday.
The other five bank holidays in England are the second day of January; St. Patrick’s Day on March 17th (seventeenth); Easter Monday, which is the Monday after Easter Sunday; May Day, which is the first Monday in May; the last Monday in May; the last Monday in August; and finally Boxing Day on the 26th (twenty-sixth) of December.
So Boxing Day is the bank holiday I’d like to talk about – it’s basically the day after Christmas, except when it falls on a Sunday. So if Christmas falls on a Saturday, the next day – 26th of December – will be a Sunday. In that case only, Boxing Day will be on the 27th.
So what IS Boxing Day? Historically speaking, the most well-accepted version is that in the nineteenth century… the day after Christmas was the day servants and manual workers received gifts, known as “Christmas boxes”, from their employers and customers. In modern times, though, Boxing Day is best known as a big shopping holiday – a lot like Black Friday in the US.
Another holiday here is St. Patrick’s Day, which is a religious bank holiday on March 17th. It celebrates Patrick, a missionary who, according to tradition, converted the pagan Irish to Christianity. Nowadays, when celebrating St Patrick’s Day, it’s tradition to wear green clothing to the parades and festivities all over the UK.
So I’ve told you about a few bank holidays here in my neck of the woods – which Brazilian public holidays can you remember? Let me know in the comments, and talk to you next year!
Ana criou um blog de dicas de inglês em 2006, e depois de muito pesquisar o que faz alguém ganhar fluência numa segunda língua, criou seu primeiro curso de inglês em 2009.
When I try to listen by my podcast app the transcription and the informations is about the “Public Holidays” podcast, but the audio is about the “GIG word”.
I’m not sure if it’s happen with everybody, but I try to download the audio again and got the same error.
