watching the english 2. composition

Composition
WATCHING THE ENGLISH
RITES OF PASSAGE

Rites of passage are rites which accompany every change of place, state social position and age. ( like: christenings, weddings, funerals…..and other big celebrations along the year like Christmas, New Year’s ’eve, Easter, mayday Halloween, Mother’s day, Valentine’s day, and other special moments like graduations, eighteen birthday celebrations….)
These kind of celebrations with little or big differences are common in our society.
Because only humans seem to feel the necessity to make an almighty song-and-dance over each of these life-cycle transitions, surrounding them with elaborate rituals and investing every biological and seasonal change with deep social significance.
There are a lot of things that are similar to the United Kingdom and other areas in Western Europe, so our babies are christened in white and have godparents, girls wear white wedding clothes, we wear black at funerals, we exchange gifts at Christmas, eat chocolate eggs in Easter, sing “happy birthday to you”, translated in our languages and so on….
When I was reading this part of the book I remember the film “Four weddings and a Funeral” and I realized that there are little differences. Each wedding can be different, there are a lot of thinks and connotations like: the quantity of money that you can spent for the celebration, season, place, moment of the day morning or evening…….it is not the same a wedding in spring or in winter, or in a religious or a civil ceremony….
When I saw this film, I realized that for English people are more important friends than family and relatives…. Here in Spain, parents, parent’s friends or family are very important, specially if parents pay the celebration….and there are a lot of old people in this kind of celebrations….
For funerals, here in Spain, people make a lot of noise, people cry, with a lot of tears, specially if you live in a village, all the people go to visit the deceased house, talking and kissing the family,,,, and the family have to make coffee and serve drinks… it is very sad, specially if the deceased is a very close relative, like mother, father or same son.….I remember when my father dead, he was a young man, and my sister and me have to receive all the people that came home, all the people kissed us, and it was extremely nasty, after five of six hours, when almost all the village people passed there, we needed to clean our faces with hot water and soap.
Here we don’t use to put so many flowers over the coffin as English people, and relatives or friends don’t talk at the celebrations, just the clergymen do formal eulogies at funerals….but some thinks are changing, because nowadays it is more modern to go to the morgue and there things are more formal than at home.

I remember that once I was at Montserrat with a group of British tourists, (I think that you know that is very useful to celebrate weddings there)….and wedding took place, all the people look very smart with beautiful and expensive clothes, new bags and shoes, and so on. It was in winter time and a lot of women were wearing in black….British people were very interesting to look how the things took place….and they made me a “strange question”: Why all the women were wearing in black??? Well, because black is an elegant colour, specially in winter when we wear warm clothes, was my answer, what??? For them black was the colour that people use to wear at funerals only….
Then I remember that the Mother Queen, in spite of that she was a very old lady, she used to wear pink, almond green, baby blue, lemon yellow coats, so very very clear colours in winter too.

Little differences of taste….

Another day I would like to write to you about the use of alcohol in the rites of passage…. We (people on the Mediterranean countries) have another concept about wines and champagne or cava wines.