Britain is a country governed by routine. It has fewer public holidays than most other countries in Europe. Even New Year’s Day was not an official public holiday (except in Scotland) until 1974, but so many people gave themselves a holiday anyway that it was thought it might as well become official! There are almost no semi-official holidays either. Most official holidays occur either just before or just after a weekend, so that the practice of making a ‘bridge’ between the holiday and the weekend is almost unknown. Moreover, there are no traditional extra holidays in particular localities. Although the origin of the word ‘holiday’ is ‘holy day’, not all public holidays during the year (usually known as ‘bank holidays’) are connected with religious celebrations.¹ (A national holiday?)

The British also seem to do comparatively badly with regard to annual holidays. There are not as long as they are in many other countries. Although the average employee gets about four weeks’ paid holiday a year, in no town or city in the country would a visitor ever get the impression that the place had ‘shut down’ for the summer break.

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Traditional seaside holidays

The British upper class started the fashion for seaside holidays in the late eighteenth century. The middle classes soon followed them and when, around the beginning of the twentieth century, they were given the opportunity, so did the working classes. It soon became normal for families to spend a week or two every year at one of the seaside resort towns which sprang up to cater for this new mass market. The most well known of these are near to the bigger towns and cities² .

These resorts quickly developed certain characteristics that are now regarded as typical of the ‘traditional’ English holiday. They have some hotels where richer people stay, but most families stay at boarding houses. These are small family businesses, offering either ‘bed and breakfast’ or, more rarely, ‘full board’ (all meals). Some streets in seaside resorts are full of nothing but boarding houses. The food in these, and in local restaurants, is cheap and conventional with an emphasis on traditional British food. (Rock)

Stereotypically, daytime entertainment in sunny weather centers around the beach, where the children can sometimes go for donkey rides, make sandcastles, buy ice-creams, and swim in the sea. Older adults often do not bother to go swimming. They are happy just to sit in their deck chairs and occasionally go for a paddle with their skirts or trouser-legs hitched up. The water is always cold, and despite efforts to clean it up, sometimes very dirty. But for adults who swim, some resorts still have wooden huts on or near the beach, known as ‘beach huts’, ‘bathing huts’, or ‘beach cabins’, in which people can change into swimming costumes (The perfect summer house). Swimming and sunbathing without any clothing is rare. All resorts have various other kinds of attraction, including more-or-less permanent funfairs.³ (Seaside postcards)

For the evenings, and when it is raining, there are amusement arcades, bingo halls, discos, theatres, bowling alleys, and so on, many of these situated on the pier. This distinctively British architectural structure is a platform extending out into the sea. The large resorts have lighted decorations which are switched on at night. The ‘Blackpool illuminations’, for example, are famous.

Another type of holiday that was very popular in the 1950s and 1960s is the holiday camp, where visitors stayed in chalets in self-contained villages with all their food and entertainment organized for them. Butlin’s and Pontin’s, the companies which owned most of these, are well-known names in Britain. The enforced good humour, strict meal times and events such as ‘knobbly knees’ competitions and beauty contests that were characteristic of these camps have now been replaced by a more relaxed atmosphere.

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Modern holidays
Both of these traditional types of holiday have become less popular in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The increase in car ownership has encouraged many people to take caravan holidays. But the greatest cause in the decline of the traditional holiday is foreign tourism.⁴ Before the 1960s, only rich people took holidays abroad. By 1972, the British were taking seven million foreign holidays per year and by 1987, 20 million. In 2006, the figure was 45 million.

Most foreign holidays are package holidays, in which flights and accommodation are booked and paid for through a travel agent. These holidays are often booked a long time in advance. In midwinter, the television companies run programmes which give information about the packages being offered. People need cheering up at this time of the year! In many British homes, it has become traditional to get the brochures out and start talking about where to go in the summer on Boxing day. Spain is by far the most popular destination for this kind of holiday. In fact, more than a quarter of all kinds of holiday taken abroad by British people in 2006 were to Spain. Hundreds of thousands of British people now own (or part-own) villas in Spain and, because flights are so cheap, they go there more than once a year. In fact, the availability of cheap flights has allowed some people to go to distant European cities just for long weekends. The possible effects that this is having on the climate, however, mean that this habit may not last much longer. The next most popular destination for British tourists is France, where they can travel by taking their cars across the channel.

Half of all the holidays taken within Britain are now for three days or less. Every bank holiday weekend, the television carries news of long traffic jams along the routes to the most popular holiday areas.⁵ The traditional seaside resorts have survived by adjusting themselves to this trend. (Only the rich have second houses or cottages in the countryside to which they can escape at weekends.) But there are also many other types of holiday. Hiking in the country and sleeping at youth hotels has long been popular (see chapter 5). There are also a wide range of ‘activity’ holidays offered, giving full expression to British individualism. You can, for example, take part in a ‘murder mystery weekend’, and find yourself living out the plot of a detective story.

Some people go on ‘working’ holidays, during which they help to repair an ancient stone wall or take part in an archaeological dig. This is an echo of another traditional type of holiday – fruit picking.⁶ It used to be the habit of poor people from the east end of London, for example, to go down to Kent and help with the hop harvest (hops are used for making beer).

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Christmas
Christmas is the one occasion in modern Britain when a large number of customs are enthusiastically observed by most ordinary people at family level. The slow decrease in participation in organized religion (see chapter 13), and the fact that Christmas in modern times is as much a secular celebration as a religious one, has had little effect on these traditions. Even people who consider themselves to be anti-religious quite happily wish each other a ‘Happy Christmas’ or a ‘Merry Christmas’. They do not (as in some other countries) self-consciously wish each other a ‘Happy New Year’ instead. (The Chrismas party)

Indeed, the ‘commercialization’ of Christmas has itself become part of tradition. Every November in Oxford Street (one of the main shopping streets in the center of London), a famous personality ceremoniously switches on the ‘Christmas lights’ (decorations), thus ‘officially’ marking the start of the period of frantic Christmas shopping. And it certainly is frantic. Between that time and the middle of January, most shops do nearly half of their total business for the year. (As soon as the Christmas rush finishes, on Boxing Day, the shops begin their winter sales.) Most people buy presents for the other members of their household and also for other relatives, especially children. Some people also buy presents for their close friends. And to a wider circle of friends and relatives and sometimes also to working associates and neighbours, they send Christmas cards (Christmas cards). Some even send such greetings to people who they have not seen for many years, often using the excuse of this tradition to include a letter passing on the year’s news.

People also buy Christmas trees (a traditional imported from Germany in the late nineteenth century). Most households have a tree and decorate it themselves (in many cases, with coloured lights). Most people also put up other decorations around the house.⁷ Exactly what these are varies a great deal, but certain symbols of Christmas, such as bits of the holly and mistletoe plants, are very common, and the Christmas cards which the household has received are usually displayed. A few people go even further and put up decorations outside their house. These most commonly consist of lights arranged in the shape of seasonal motifs. A few households also have a ‘crib’, a model depicting the birth of Christ.

Another feature of December is the singing of carols (usually, but not always, with a religious theme). These are sung in churches and schools, often at special concerts, and also, though less often than in the past, by groups of people who go from house to house raising money for charitable causes. (Panto)

An indication of the importance attached to Christmas in British people’s minds is that many people who do not go to church during the rest of the year do so at this time, and churches find attendance swelling by three times its normal amount. A 2005 poll found that 43% of the adult population expected to attend a church service over the Christmas period.

Customs concerning the role of Father Christmas (Santa Claus) in the giving of gifts vary from family to family. Most households continue the traditional child’s concept that Father Christmas comes down the chimney on the night of Christmas Eve, even though most houses no longer have a working chimney! Many children lay out a Christmas stocking at the foot of their beds, which they expect to see filled when they wake up on Christmas morning. Most families lay out presents, wrapped, around or on the Christmas tree, and these are opened at some time on Christmas Day.

Other activities in which many families engage on Christmas Day are the eating of Christmas dinner (Christmas dinner) and listening to the Queen’s Christmas message. This ten minute television broadcast is normally the only time in the year when the monarch speaks directly to ‘her’ people on television. (But if people don’t like this idea, there is an ‘alternative’, sometimes controversial Christmas message on Channel 4, delivered by a different person each year.)

There is a general feeling that Christmas is a time for families. Many of the gatherings in houses on Christmas Day and Boxing Day consist of extended families (more than just parents and children). In many families, Christmas is the only time that such gatherings occur.⁸

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New Year
All that celebrating is very tiring and many employers now give their employees the whole of the time between Christmas and New Year off. In contrast to the family emphasis on Christmas, parties at New Year’s Eve are regarded more as a time for friends. Most people attend a gathering at this time and ‘see in’ the new year together, often drinking a large amount of alcohol as they do so. Some people in the London region go to the traditional celebrations at Trafalgar Square (where there is an enormous Christmas tree- an annual gift from the people of Norway).

In Scotland, where Calvinist tradition was not happy about parties and celebrations connected with religious occasions (such as Christmas), New Year, called Hogmanay, is given particular importance – so much importance that, in Scotland only, 2 January (as well as New Year’s Day) is also a public holiday, so people have two days to recover from their New Year’s Eve parties instead of just one! The crowd at the Hogmanay street party in Edinburgh is actually much larger than that in Trafalgar Square. Some British New Year customs such as the singing of the song Auld Lang Syne, originated in Scotland. Another, less common, one is the custom of ‘first footing’, in which the first person to visit a house in the new year is supposed to arrive with tokens of certain important items for survival (such as a lump of coal for the fire).

As a well-known Christmas carol reminds people, there are twelve days of Christmas. In fact, most people go back to work and school soon after New Year. Nobody pays much attention to the feast of the epiphany on 6 January (the twelfth day of Christmas), except that this is traditionally the day on which Christmas decorations are taken down. Some people say it is bad luck to keep them up after this date.⁹

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Other notable annual occasions
Easter is far less important than Christmas in Britain. Although it involves a four-day weekend, there are very few customs and habits associated generally with it, other than the mountains of chocolate Easter eggs which children consume. Some people preserve the tradition of eating hot cross buns on Good Friday (Calendar of special occasions). Quite a lot of people go away on holiday. (St. Valentine's Day and Gretna Green)

None of the other days of the year to which traditional customs are attached is a holiday, and not everybody takes part in these customs. In fact, many people in Britain live through occasions such as Shrove Tuesday and April Fools’ Day without even knowing they have happened. (Shrove Tuesday)

There are two other days which, although many people do not do anything special on them, are very difficult to ignore. One of these is Halloween, the day before All Saints’ Day in the Christian calendar. It has long been associated with the supernatural (witches, ghosts, etc.). Some people hold Halloween parties, which are fancy-dress. Traditionally, this day was observed much more energetically in America than in Britain. But recently, the American custom of ‘trick or treat’(in which groups of children call at houses and challenge the person who answers the door to give them something nice to eat or be prepared to have a trick played on them) has been imported.

The other day is only five days later. This is the day which celebrates a famous event in British history – the gunpowder plot. It is called Guy Fawkes Day – or, more commonly, Guy Fawkes Night. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, a group of Catholics planned to blow up the Houses of Parliament while the king was in there. Before they could achieve this, one of them, Guy Fawkes, was caught in the cellars under Parliament with the gunpowder. He and his fellow conspirators were all brought to trial and then killed. At the time, the failure of the gunpowder plot was celebrated as a victory for British Protestantism over rebel Catholicism. In modern times, it has lost its religious and patriotic connotations. In most parts of Britain, Catholic children celebrate it just as enthusiastically as Protestant children – or, for that matter, children brought up in any other religious faith (as with Christmas, most of the customs associated with this day are mainly for the benefit of children). Some children make a ‘Guy’ out of old clothes stuffed with newspaper several weeks beforehand. They then place this somewhere on the street and ask passers-by for ‘a penny for the Guy’. What they are actually asking for is money to buy fireworks.

On Guy Fawkes Night itself, there are bonfire parties throughout the country, at which the ‘Guy’ is burnt. Some people cook food in the embers of the bonfire, especially chestnuts or potatoes. So many fireworks are set off that, by the end of the evening, the air in all British cities smells strongly of sulphur. Every year, accidents with the fireworks injure or even kill several people. In an effort to make things safer, some local authorities arrange public firework displays and bonfires.¹⁰

Finally, one other day should be mentioned. This is a different day for everybody – their birthday. Once again, it is most important for children, all of whom receive presents on this day from their parents, and often from other relatives as well. Adults may or may not receive presents, depending on the customs of their family and their circle of friends. Many will simply be wished ‘Happy Birthday’ (not ‘Congratulations’ unless it is a special birthday, such as a twenty-first). Some children and adults have a party on their birthdays, but not all. Moreover, nobody, including adults, is automatically expected to extend hospitality to other people on their birthday, and it is not expected that people should bring along cakes or anything to share with their colleagues at work (although some people do).

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