narrative essay about christmas break

Christmas Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on christmas essay.

Christmas is a well-known Christian holiday set in December, celebrated the world over and famed for its decorations and Santa Clause. The Christmas means  “Feast day of Christ”.It is a yearly celebration marking Jesus Christ’s birth; it is observed on the 25th of December as a cultural and religious celebration among a lot of people all over the world. Christmas is celebrated in all Christian countries but there are differences in the way each nation celebrates this date.

History Behind Christmas

The history of Christmas is one that dates back to a very long time; the first Christmas was celebrated in 336 A.D. in Rome. It played a very important role during the famed Arian controversy that took place in the 300s. During the early years of the middle age, epiphany overshadowed it.

Christmas was brought back to limelight around 800 A.D. when the emperor Charlemagne received the crown on Christmas day. During the 17th century, the Puritans had Christmas banned because it was associated with drunkenness and different other misbehavior.

It was made a proper holiday around 1660 but was still quite disreputable. Around the early 1900s, the Oxford movement of the Anglican Communion church started and this led to the revival of Christmas.

Preparations for Christmas

Christmas is a cultural festivity that entails a lot of preparations. It is a public holiday and so people get a Christmas break to celebrate it.

Preparations for Christmas start early for most people so that celebrations begin on the eve of Christmas. Preparations for Christmas involves a lot of activities. People usually buy decorations, food, and gifts mostly for children in the family and friends. Some families shop for matching Christmas outfits for everyone.

The common preparations include decorations of the place with Christmas trees, lighting. Before decorations begin, the house must be deep cleaned. The Christmas tree brings the Christmas spirit in homes.

Presents are placed under the Christmas tree in wrapped gift boxes and are not to be opened until Christmas day. The church is also decorated for the special event. Thorough cleaning of the churches is also done to usher in Christmas. Songs and skits to be performed on Christmas day.

People usually spend a lot on Christmas and so saving money for these plans should be the earliest preparation among all these. Families also plan to travel to stay together during this celebration period. Traditionally turkey is the common meal across the world in this day. Cards are also written to friends and family to wish them a happy holiday and to show love.

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Christmas Day Celebration

Christmas carols are played on radios and televisions to mark the day. Most families start by going to church where performances and songs are done. Then later, they join their families to exchange gifts and celebrate with food and music. Happiness during Christmas is like no other.

Homemade traditional plum cakes, cupcakes, and muffins are the special treats on Christmas. Kids are showered with lots of presents and new dresses. They also get to meet the ‘Santa Claus’, dressed in a fluffy red and white costume, who greets them with hugs and gifts.

Conclusion:

Christmas reminds us of the importance of giving and sharing with friends and family. Through Christmas, we know that Jesus birth is the beginning of great things in the world. It is generally an opportunity to think about nature and the reason for our existence. Christmas is such a festival which people from all religions and faith celebrate worldwide despite it being a Christian festival. It is the essence of this festival which unites the people so much.

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The Interpreter

A very royal scavenger hunt.

Taking part in mass online sleuthing can feel thrilling. But the same impulses can take a dark turn.

By Amanda Taub

In 1933, a new craze took New York society by storm: the scavenger hunt. It began at a party that Elsa Maxwell , a prominent gossip columnist, threw at the Waldorf Astoria. Her guests were divided into small teams who competed against each other to obtain a list of items that included a live monkey, a red lantern and “the most beautiful woman in New York (not present at the party).”

The game caught on, and soon groups of merrymakers were scavenging all over the United States. It’s easy to see why: scavenger hunts were amusing, challenging and competitive. They offered unpredictable outcomes — you try obtaining a live monkey on short notice after dark — but they were also social, allowing people to bond over the thrill of the hunt and the status of finishing before other competitors.

Actual scavenger hunts have largely faded from fashion. But today, online variants are never more than a smartphone away. Social media users band together to search out information and interpret clues: Grainy cellphone videos of Taylor Swift’s outfits become a way for her fans to predict the titles of her forthcoming albums . One celebrity unfollowing another on Instagram or Twitter becomes a clue about the end of a relationship. It’s not all frivolous. Members of “open-source intelligence” groups, or OSINT, have gathered evidence of war crimes and identified the likely perpetrators.

The internet, in other words, has made it possible to turn aspects of reality — not only the most opaque, mysterious bits, but also the most sensational or emotive elements — into massively multiplayer online scavenger hunts. And in an increasingly atomized world , it turns out that working together to gather photos and videos like they are so many purloined monkeys is fun, while the feeling of having access to better information than other people, or even uncovering a secret, is deeply satisfying.

This taps into some deep-seated human instincts, experts say.

“Some people find fighting for a common cause, discovering and uncovering the truth about something, which can be likened to true crime podcasts and online detectives, incredibly fulfilling,” said Carolina Are, a platform governance researcher at Northumbria University’s Center for Digital Citizens.

In a time when global 24-hour news coverage can engender feelings of powerlessness, the sense of control that online sleuthing generates is potent. But those same impulses can take a darker turn into conspiracy theories.

Today, the spread of conspiracy-driven online scavenger hunts is being buoyed by social media algorithms — which amplify the most outrageous and emotional content to boost engagement. At worst, that can lead to violence in the real world, including deadly pogroms , as in Sri Lanka in 2018, and political insurrections . But even lesser cases can lead to harassment and other harm.

The recent furor over the whereabouts of Catherine, Princess of Wales, better known as Kate Middleton, shows how easily online groups can drift into conspiracy theories, and how those theories, in turn, can surge into mainstream culture.

And the British royal family, a deeply conservative and closed institution that has long struggled to maintain a balance between accessibility and privacy, may be especially vulnerable to becoming a target of such online frenzies — and especially limited in its ability to defend against them.

The conspiracy square

Most conspiratorial narratives that take off online rely on four common components, Are says. She calls it the “conspiracy square.” There is the supposed victim, who is usually already beloved, or at least photogenic or charismatic; the villain, who is blamed for whatever has supposedly befallen the victim; the institution that is believed to be covering up or encouraging the villain’s wrongdoing; and the media, which amplifies the conspiracy narrative.

Some members of the royal family, particularly the princes and princesses of its younger generation, are easy to slot into that victim role. They are wealthy, famous and photogenic, and their roles in public life make them beloved to many.

Catherine, particularly, was a ready-made focus for a conspiracy narrative, not only because she is glamorous and widely liked in Britain (helped by favorable coverage in the tabloid press), but also because she has been more private about her life than many other royals. “Kate’s signature has been her composure, her discretion,” Arianne Chernock, a historian at Boston University who studies the British Monarchy, told me. “Kate has been a much more private person” than Princess Diana, she said.

The recent conspiracy theories came prepackaged with villains: In the speculative corners of the internet, William was slotted into the villain role that Charles once occupied in coverage of Diana, for instance.

And as an institution, the royal family is, by its nature, particularly vulnerable to faultfinding and even ridicule: it is after all a centuries-old constitutional relic , built on strange rituals and funded by British taxpayers, that many see as anachronistic in a modern parliamentary democracy. At its heart is a paradox: it is a family of human beings held together by relationships and love, but it is also “ the firm, ” as Prince Philip called it, an organization that ruthlessly pursues its own interests, even at the expense of the royals themselves.

Importantly, there was an existing online subculture devoted to speculating about the royal family’s perceived mistreatment of its members: supporters of Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, often called the “Sussex squad,” had long combed royal coverage for evidence of wrongdoing.

That community became a source of some of the conspiracy narratives that were amplified by social media algorithms and even a Russian-linked disinformation operation . And the scale of online speculation then became a subject of mainstream media coverage, which added further fuel to the fire, a feedback loop that Are said is common.

Never complain, never explain

Famously, Queen Elizabeth II used to follow a motto of “never complain, never explain,” keeping her public profile stoic and devoid of ancillary detail about her life. Today, the royal family is struggling to strike a more delicate balance between privacy and disclosure.

“Something that was very apparent this time was that there was an information vacuum,” Are said, describing Catherine’s long break from public life after abdominal surgery and William, the Prince of Wales, unexpectedly withdrawing from a public engagement a few weeks later. In that relative silence, the photoshopped family portrait released for British Mother’s Day seemed like further evidence of a story being hidden from the public.

By contrast, disclosing slightly more information, especially if it is “watertight and difficult to engineer” — such as Catherine’s video in which she disclosed her cancer on camera — can fill enough of the vacuum to halt most rumors, Are said. (Although even the video, which was filmed by the BBC to reduce speculation about its veracity, has become the subject of fresh disinformation in some corners of the internet.)

Disclosing health information can also be a way for the royal family to lead, Chernock said. “The vulnerabilities can be a point of strength. I think that Diana helped to destigmatize eating disorders, and for a lot of women the bond with her was intensified by her disclosure.”

“What we saw with that photograph is that the online environment is prone to hyperbole, it’s toxic and it is beyond any one person’s control,” Chernock added. “So it’s important more than ever now to be proactive.”

That is a significant burden to place on members of the royal family, who may be pressured to disclose information that they wish to keep private.

At the root of much of the wild speculation of recent weeks is a kernel of truth: being a part of Britain’s royal family, for all the privilege and wealth that it entails, has been deeply damaging for some of its past members.

And this latest round of speculation shows that in our extremely online, conspiracy-obsessed moment, even attempts to mitigate that harm can backfire, leaving the individuals involved more exposed than before.

Amanda Taub writes the Interpreter , an explanatory column and newsletter about world events. She is based in London. More about Amanda Taub