Only a few months of the year present as many multicultural celebrations as December. From Christmas to Hanukkah, the last month of the year is a ‘world of holidays’ or popularly called as the ‘holiday season’.
Welcoming the Holiday Season
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ou may have heard people, companies or advertisers talk about the ‘holiday season’. If so, you might be wondering exactly what ‘holiday season’ means. Don’t people take vacations all year round? And aren’t there public holidays at different times during the year? The answer to both these questions is yes, but ‘holiday season’ is a North American term that refers to the period from Thanksgiving until the New Year. This covers many of the most important holidays in American culture when most people in the USA and Canada are likely to travel back to their hometown or take time off to spend time with their family. In the UK and in other Englishspeaking countries, you are more likely to hear people talk about the “festive season”, which covers the build up to Christmas until the start of the New Year, or the “Christmas holidays”, which is the week lasting from Christmas Eve to New Year’s Day. Many businesses in the UK close completely during this time and employees take the whole time off as holiday. So, let’s look at which holidays take place during the ‘holiday
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season’. Hanukkah Hanukkah (also called the Festival of Lights) is an important Jewish holiday that lasts for eight days and nights. The exact start date changes each year, but it always falls in November or December. In the 2nd Century BC, the Jewish people fought back against the Seleucid Empire that had taken over much of the Middle East and made Judaism illegal. Hanukkah is all about the moment that the Jewish fighters took back the Holy Temple in Jerusalem and were able to practise their religion again. Today, Jews all
over the world celebrate the festival by lighting candles in a traditional eightbranch candle holder called a Menorah, eat delicacies like doughnuts and spend time with their families and
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