8 - Bonfire Night
Hello and welcome to episode 8 of the Gold Forest English Podcast. My name is Jordan and today I want to talk about a holiday that has just gone by. Earlier this week on November 5th there was a holiday in the UK called Bonfire Night. Sometimes people call it Bonfire Night, sometimes people call this holiday Guy Fawkes night. It's a very popular holiday in the UK and it happens every year on November 5th.
The origins of this holiday… the reason why it's celebrated, happened about 400 years ago..and what happened was that there was a group of people who wanted to destroy the Houses of Parliament in London. They wanted to blow it up with explosives. And this plan was almost successful, but the police, people were able to catch the criminals, the terrorists. They were able to catch them and stop them before the explosives destroyed the houses of parliament…destroyed these big important buildings in London. After these criminals were caught, the government and the people in charge decided that November 5th (the day that it was stopped) they decided that November 5th should be a holiday to celebrate the fact that they were unsuccessful.
On this holiday, people usually have large bonfires, large fires outside with wood and plants to make a large fire; and they also have fireworks that they shoot and explode and watch fireworks shows. This holiday happens every November 5th. So in England, it gets dark early in the evening and it's quite cold; so people enjoy watching fireworks and standing around the warm fires in the evening. There's no special food or drink for this holiday. It's really just an activity day where we enjoy fireworks and fires.
One of the older traditions that is still popular now, but less popular than it used to be, is to make a fake person - a fake human - out of old clothes and plants and straw inside the clothes, to make it look like a person, and this fake person would be put on the fire and burned. And the original idea was that this fake person was Guy Fawkes, one of the people from the original plan to blow up the houses of parliament. And so people would burn a fake effigy, we'd call it an effigy, like a fake person. People would burn these effigies on fires as a way of punishing his idea, his spirit. So that they would celebrate that he and his other people got caught and they were unsuccessful in blowing up this important building in London.
So often what would happen, mostly in the past but occasionally now, is that children would create these effigies. Children would create some fake people with their old clothes and plants and paper inside the clothes to fill them out. They would create these effigies and take them around the neighborhood, knocking on people's doors and asking for donations for their effort, for their creations of these Guy Fawkes effigies. The phrase that they would say is, “penny for the guy.” Penny is the English currency, the small English currency. So they would say, “penny for the guy,” and the people would give a small donation to the children for their hard work of making these fake people. And then later in the evening, these effigies, these fake people would be burned on the fires as part of the celebration.
This still happens in some areas and some places, but it's not as common as it used to be. And now the modern holiday is much more about enjoying the fireworks and enjoying the fires and the community event of…large fires together and enjoying fireworks shows together. The modern holiday is much less focused on the original plan to blow up the building. It's much less focused on the treason and the actual events of the 5th of November, all those hundreds of years ago.
So this year, this past November 5th, I did not celebrate this holiday. I'm currently living in Japan and Japan does not celebrate this holiday. But around this time there are fireworks shows and light shows that happen and that I want to go and enjoy and watch and keep warm in these cold autumn months as it's getting colder and colder now approaching winter. So I did not celebrate Guy Fawkes night, but I'm sure many people in England did, but it's a bit of an interesting holiday, a bit of a unique holiday to celebrate this failed plan.
So, I hope you've enjoyed listening to me talk a little bit about Guy Fawkes night, about Bonfire night, this 5th of November UK holiday.
All right. Thank you very much for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode.