New Year's Episode: the holiday season

Happy New Year! Yes, today is January 1st 2021, so we will talk about the holiday season and the new year. I wanted to make this episode before New Year’s day but here I am recording it on January 1, so my apologies. You will get it 1 day late. I have a lot of topics that I wanted to talk abou for the New Year celebration so I will break this episode into 3 parts. In English to break up means to separate so I will separate this episode into 3 parts. The first part is about the holiday season in Benin and the holiday season in American because they are a little different. The second part will be about New year’s resolutions or plans for the new year., and some ideas for making your resolutions work for the long term. And the third part of this holiday episode will be my personal resolutions.

This first part is about the holiday season. Often in Benin your English teachers will teach you the word like vacation, like vacances in French but in America we often say the word holiday for a day when we celebrate. Christmas is a holiday in America. New Year’s is a holiday and Easter is another holiday. So today we will talk about the time of the year from November to December when we have lots of holidays in America. These are some of the biggest holidays that we celebrate.

The 3 big holidays in the American holiday season are Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years. In my opinion, the 3 big holidays in the Beninese holiday season are Christmas New Year and Easter. You already know Christmas and New Year. Christmas is on December 25th and New Year’s is on January 1st, however we celebrate these holidays a little different than in Benin. In Benin New Year’s is the biggest holiday of the year. Everyone celebrates New Years. But Christmas is a holiday for Christians and my friends in Benin often told me that Christmas was for the children and not so much for adults. It is true that in America Christmas is also for children because we give lots of gifts and the children usually get more gifts than the adults, but Christmas is 100% the biggest holiday during the American year. We spend a lot of money, and time, and effort preparing for Christmas because we put up Christmas lights and a tree and we buy presents, we play music, we have many special foods and desserts that are specifically for Christmas. So Christmas is absolutely the biggest holiday of our holiday season and New Years is actually the smallest of the three holidays. It is the end of the holiday season. In Benin New Years is not the ending of the holiday season because Paque is still to come, and I know that Paque is not close to New Year’s but when I lived in Benin I felt like Paque and New Year’s were still connected.

I have not told you much about the first American holiday of the American holiday season called Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving happens at the end of November and it is a holiday for celebrating the harvest and saying thank you .The harvest is the time of the year when you go to a farm or your fields and you pick the rest of your fruit and your vegetables. There are many harvest times during the year but in America, November is the last harvest before full winter, before the end of the year, and before spring time when new plants will start growing. So we celebrate by having a big dinner where we eat many fall harvest, November harvest fruits like yams and corn and pumpkins. Pumpkins are these big round orange vegetables that we often make into a dessert with sugar. But you can also eat pumpkins in salty ways. You can make them into a soup or you can mash them like yams. There are many ways to eat pumpkins.

Those are the 3 holidays in the American holiday season. Thanksgiving in November is a big celebration for families, but the biggest is Christmas, followed by the smallest of the holiday season, New Year.s This contrasts with Benin because Benin does not have a huge Christmas celebration but it does have a very very big New Year’s celebration.