Christmas Greetings, Songs and Food Worldwide

 Merry Christmas, and a happy New Year is the traditional British English greeting. But the Americans have added a new seasonal greeting Happy Holidays. You may think they have expanded their audience to cover all religions and none. You might think they have diluted this religious greeting. or you may think it is handy to have a greeting covering both christmas and New Year. 

What do other countries say?  Santa is a saint, so he is used by all the Catholic countries. The French say Pere Noel. Father Christmas. We have a British hymn, Noel, Noel, the angels did say.

However, Spain and other countries celebrate Christmas on the day which the British call 12th night, the last of the 12 days of Christmas, which is January 5th evening and January 6th Christmas Day. You may be familiar with the song, on the first day of Chistman y true love sent to me, a partridge in a pear tree.

That's is a handy song for learning numbers. Ordinal numbers. Numbers in order, not one two, but first second.

My second language is French. I hope to live part of the year in France and be near bilingual, Brexit and the friendly French laws permitting.

Why be bilingual? It is handy for holidays, and work. If you go south to the sun in wintertime, French speaking France is our nearest neighbour.  Our shops are filled with French foods, our menus used to be in French. Croissant, pain au chocolat, bain-marie. 

My husband made a list of French words used in English, exluding food, and found more than 300. Chauffeur, entreperneur, ballet, bouquet, banquette, cul de sac, matinee, nom de plume,.naive, and suave.

Bilingual places include the capital of Canada, where you need to be fluent in both English and French to hold a government job. Belgium has two languages, French and Dutch. Switzerland has four, French, german, Italian and Romansch. Finland has Swedish as a second language, and the former capital Turku, is officially bilingual in Swedish and Finnish. I am learnin Finnish for a Finnish themed meeting of my langues club, LILT, which meets online on zoom Sunday after lunch. 9.30 Singapore time. It is a new club, run by me so that by starting a new club I can qualify as a distinguished Toastmaster. I am doing it jointly with co-founded Carolyn Street, who is a semi retired teacher of French and German in a Singaporean polytechnic.

If you go to your supermarket you will find xmas foods from all over the world. The French have buche de noel which is a yule log, chocolate cake.

Songs

The Spanish favourite is

Feliz Navidad

Feliz as in the English word felicity, from which we get the girl's name, Felicity.

LANGUAGE GREETINGS

French 

bon anniversaire happy birthday (not happy anniversary which is joyeux anniversaire

How do you rmember. which is which? Bon as in birthday, both starting with the letter b.

Seasonal Food

buch noel - (French

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