Learn all about EASTER

In most English-speaking countries in the world, the holiday of Easter is celebrated every spring. In this video, I will teach you where Easter comes from and why it is celebrated by Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Christians in many different countries. It's also a secular holiday, which means that not everybody thinks of it as a religious festival -- it's complicated, because it has been changing and developing for hundreds of years. I'll also tell you about the customs and symbols of Easter that you will encounter in the UK and North America. Watch this lesson and learn more about Western culture and traditions. You'll learn about everything from Jesus on the cross to chocolate eggs.

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TRANSCRIPT

Hello. I'm Gill at engVid, and today we have a lesson on: Easter, and what's it all about? So, if you're in a country where Easter is celebrated, you will already know a lot about it, but maybe if you're not in an English-speaking country, this will be useful for you to know the vocabulary connected with Easter in English-speaking countries. You may be in a country where Easter isn't celebrated, so this is also designed to explain the background, some of the history connected with Easter, and all the sort of traditions and the things that people do to celebrate Easter. And if you're in... For example, if you're in the U.K., you will notice that every spring around March or April there is an Easter holiday where there are two public holidays, the schools have two weeks' holiday, so you'll be aware of this Easter holiday period. So this is designed to explain some of the background to it. Okay.

So, it's a bit of a mixture, but going back hundreds of years before Christianity, for example, I think people celebrated the coming of spring after the long, cold winter, so it's a kind of spring celebration when, you know, the flowers start coming out, and blossom on the trees, and so on. Blossom. If you have fruit trees, like an apple tree or a cherry tree, they get flowers appearing on the tree, either white or pink, so that's blossom. And then the flowers that grow. So... and little animals, often animals are born in the spring. They're born all year round, of course, but in particular spring is associated with little animals being born, like little chicks that come out of eggs; little, yellow, fluffy birds; tiny, little chicks. They are associated with Easter, as well as flowers. Rabbits as well are associated with Easter. And eggs, because eggs are about things being born or rebirth, the rebirth of the... of the season, the spring coming back after the winter when nothing seemed to grow. So, people, you know... people generally feel happier and better when spring comes because the weather gets warmer. Of course it depends what part of the planet you're on, because I know March and April in somewhere like Brazil, for example, it's not... it's not your spring period, but I think people still celebrate Easter at that time of year anyway. But in where we are in the U.K. and also North America, it is the spring.

So, it falls in March or April, and people send cards sometimes that say: "Happy Easter", and you get pictures of flowers, and little chicks, and rabbits, and eggs. And so the eggs, they can either be real, you know, chicken eggs, hens' eggs from birds, or they can be chocolate eggs. So the shops... of course, shops sell eggs all the year round, real eggs; but also chocolate eggs, a lot of them are sold just before Easter. In fact, usually the shops, being very commercially-minded, as soon as Christmas is over and January comes, you start to see chocolate Easter eggs in the supermarkets, which it's a bit early in January, but that's what the shops are like. So, you get chocolate eggs, and also... In the U.K. anyway, I'm not sure about other countries, you have a sweet... a bun with fruit in it, which is called a hot cross bun. And it's a round... not a cake exactly. It's more like bread, but it's quite sweet, and it has a cross on it in a lighter colour, so it's a dark-brown or medium-brown colour when it's baked in the oven, but it has a whiter-coloured or cream-coloured cross on it, which connects with one of the religious associations that Easter has, which we'll come to a bit later. Okay. So, all of these things are associated with Easter.

Also, there's a thing called an Easter bonnet, which is a hat. Usually women, they might have a hat and they will add a lot of flowers to it, and decorate it with ribbons. They might even put little... Not real ones, but they might put little chicks on it; little, yellow birds on it, but not real ones, not live ones, but artificial ones. And there's a song and a film I think connected with this, Easter bonnet. And people might have a parade in the street, they have a competition for who's wearing the best Easter bonnet, and somebody can win the competition. So, that can happen as well. […]