At the end of December I gave my second-year students a listening task which was inspired by the carol ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’. I first found out about the song in 2012, when I studied and lived in London, and they decorated Regents Street with quotes from it. A few months ago I heard the song on Andy Williams’ 1963 Christmas album and thought up the following class activity. I wrote the first verse on the board (On the First day of Christmas / My good friends brought to me / A song and a Christmas tree) and asked the students to predict what other things would be mentioned. Then we listened to the rest of the song and checked their predictions. Some were correct, and the ones that weren’t were quite interesting too (e.g. roast duck)!
Two years ago, in December 2019, I came up with a Christmas listening activity based on the male version of the famous song Santa Baby, as found on Michael Bublé’s 2011 Christmas album. I asked my second-year students to listen for the things the Canadian singer asks Santa – among which are ‘Canucks tix’ and ‘decorations bought at Mercedes’. And last academic year, at the end of December 2020, I had a Zoom class with one of my first-year groups in which we discussed New Year’s resolutions. We did it as follows: I asked each student to send me three of their resolutions in a private message (for example, ‘to find a part-time job’), and then I shared them one by one in mixed order in the group chat asking the students to guess the author. It was a lot of fun!
Speaking about this year’s Christmas – or rather last year’s already, that is Christmas 2021 – I found Queen Elizabeth II’s traditional address especially moving. It featured children in particular. The British monarch spoke about children’s ability to see the joy in simple things and said that ‘in the birth of a child there is a new dawn with endless potential’. By the way, the twelve-day Christmas period, also called Twelvetide, is followed by Epiphany, ‘a Christian festival, held on the 6 January, in memory of the time when the Magi came to see the baby Jesus at Bethlehem’. In France and some other countries they make a ‘galette des rois’ to mark the occasion. Traditionally, they decorate the puff pastry pie with a paper crown and hide a figurine inside, and it is believed that the person who finds it will be lucky for the rest of the year.
What about you? Do you have favourite Christmas songs and sweets?
/Photo taken by me in Regents Street in January 2020/
