Unit 5 How to Celebrate Holidays

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Unit 5 How to Celebrate Holidays
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Contents
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Thanksgiving Day

• Thanksgiving is celebrated in the US on the
  fourth Thursday in November. For many Americans
  it is the most important holiday apart from
  Christmas. Schools, offices and most businesses
  close for Thanksgiving, and many people make the
  whole weekend a vacation.

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Thanksgiving Day

• Origin
• Thanksgiving is associated with the time when
  Europeans first came to North America. In 1620
  the ship the Mayflower arrived, bringing about
  150 people who today are usually called Pilgrims.
  They arrived at the beginning of a very hard
  winter and could not find enough to eat, so many
  of them died. But in the following summer Native
  Americans showed them what foods were safe to
  eat, so that they could save food for the next
  winter. They held a big celebration to thank God
  and the Native Americans for the fact that they
  had survived.

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Thanksgiving Day
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Thanksgiving Day

• Celebration
• The most important part of the celebration is
  a traditional dinner with foods that come from
  North America. The meal includes turkey, sweet
  potatoes (also called yams) and cranberries,
  which are made into a kind of sauce or jelly. The
  turkey is filled with stuffing or dressing, and
  many families have their own special recipe.
  Dessert is pumpkin pie.
• On Thanksgiving there are special television
  programs and sports events. In New York there is
  the Macys Thanksgiving Day Parade, when a long
  line of people wearing fancy costumes march
  through the streets with large balloons in the
  shape of imaginary characters.

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Thanksgiving Day
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Thanksgiving Day
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The Pilgrims

• The English people who sailed to America on the
  Mayflower in 1620. their group included 35
  Puritans whose aim was to create a safe religious
  community in the New World. The Pilgrims probably
  landed at Plymouth Rock, and they established
  Plymouth colony.

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The Pilgrims
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Native Americans

• Native Americans had been living in North America
  for many hundreds of years before Europeans
  reached the continent. For a long time white
  people called them Indians.

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The US Coast Guard

• The US military service that is controlled by the
  US Department of Transportation but becomes part
  of the US Navy during a war. It was established
  in 1915. the Coast Guard stops ships suspected of
  carrying drugs and other illegal goods, and can
  make arrests. It also keeps watch to see that
  other laws of the sea are obeyed, rescues ships
  in danger and has a weather service.

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Alex Haley (1921-1992)
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Alex Haley (1921-1992)

• The author of the widely acclaimed novel Roots
  was born in Ithaca, New York on August 11, 1921,
  and reared in Henning, Tennessee. The oldest of
  three sons of a college professor father and a
  mother who taught grade school (his mother died
  when he was ten), Haley graduated from high
  school at fifteen and attended college for two
  years before enlisting in the United States Coast
  Guard in 1939. Haley died February 10, 1992, of a
  heart attack.

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Alex Haley (1921-1992)

• Haley began writing short stories while working
  at sea, but it took eight years before small
  magazines began accepting some of his stories. By
  1952, the Coast Guard had created a new rating
  for Haley, chief journalist, and he began
  handling United States Coast Guard public
  relations. In 1959, after 20 years of military
  service, he retired from the Coast Guard and
  launched a new career as a freelance writer.

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Alex Haley (1921-1992)
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Alex Haley (1921-1992)

• Roots
• The book Roots, excerpted in Readers Digest
  in 1974 and heralded for several years, was
  finally published in the fall of 1976 with very
  wide publicity and reviews. In it Haley traced
  his ancestry back to Africa and covered seven
  American generations, starting from his ancestor,
  Kunta Kinte, who was kidnapped into slavery from
  the small village of Juffure, in The Gambia, West
  Africa.

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Alex Haley (1921-1992)

• The book was adapted to television series, and
  woke up an interest in genealogy, particularly
  among African-Americans. The United States Senate
  passed a resolution paying tribute to Haley and
  comparing Roots to Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet
  Beecher Stowe in the 1850s. The book received m
  any awards, including the National Book Award for
  1976 special citation of merit in history and a
  special Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for making an
  important contribution to the literature of
  slavery.

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• Thank You !