Holidays

People in every country celebrate holidays. There are only 6 public holidays a year in Great Britain, those are days on which people need not go to work. They are: Christmas day, Boxing Day, Good Friday, Easter Monday, Spring Bank Holiday and Late Summer Bank Holiday. In Scotland, the New Year’s Day is also a public holiday.

For many British families Christmas is the most important holiday. Christmas is celebrated on the 25-th of December. Christmas is a religious holiday and one of the happiest holidays of the year, because it is the day that Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ.

People prepare for Christmas weeks before: they buy gifts for their families and friends, choose fir-trees and decorate them with ornaments, coloured paper, holly and lights, different toys and candles.

There are a lot of traditions connected with Christmas but perhaps the most important one is Christmas presents. Children wait for Santa Claus who comes to every house and brings presents. Going to bed children leave their stockings and shoes to receive presents the next morning. Family members sit down to a big turkey dinner followed by Christmas pudding and Christmas cake. Later in the afternoon they will watch the Queen on TV as she delivers her traditional message to the UK and the Commonwealth. People wish each other a “Merry Christmas!”

There are a lot of holidays in Kazakhstan. One of the most important Kazakh holiday is “Nauryz” – the Kazakh New Year.

On the 22-nd of March families get together to help one another on constructing a “yurt” which is the traditional Kazakh home. Since the Kazakh were originally nomadic people they had homes that could be easily set up and moved from one place to another.

If enter a yurt on Nauryz you will see that it is decorated with beautiful Kazakh ornaments, rugs and blankets.

As a guest you will sit at a long low table and eat such Kazakh dishes as “karta”, “plov”, “baursak”, “besbarmak”. An elder “aksakal” will usually have the task of cutting the sheep’s head and saying words of blessing while giving each part of the head to a different person.

At the end of the meal you will have tea and listen to musicians playing dombyras and kobyz and singing songs. Then you can see many ancient Kazakh games.  One of the major features of Nauryz is the traditional costumes that men and women wear.

Nauryz

Nauryz is one of the oldest holidays on the Earth. This holiday of spring and renewed life of the Earth has been celebrated for over five thousand years by many cultures of the Middle and Central Asia. It was the day when the first spring thunder strikes, flowers and trees grow fast.

On the eve of the holiday, people would clean their homes, pay back their debts because, as the old people used to say,  if Nauryz entered the house,  all diseases and troubles would pass it by.

On the night before the festival, all vessels in the house would be filled with milk, airan, grain, and spring water because it meant that people would have a lot of milk, good harvest and plenty of rain during the  coming year. Seven bowls with the Nauryz-kozhe drink would be put in front of the aksakals.

The meals were composed of seven components, usually meat, salt, fat, onions, wheat, kurt and irimshik.

Nowadays Nauryz has been widely celebrated across the whole country. Of course, the modern festival is different from the old. It has become a truly national holiday of spring, work and unity.

renewed life - обновленная жизнь

debts - долги

good harvest - хороший урожай

all vessels - все сосуды