Christmas vocabulary: what's behind the holiday? https://english4today.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/english4today_christmas.mp3 Yes, it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas! And if you are in a country where Christianity is the dominant religion you will certainly see signs of it everywhere you go! Now, I don’t want to take the fun out of what is a really good holiday but Christmas is not everything that it seems to be.You may know it as one of the most important Christian festivals celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ but, like a lot of other festivals, there is a healthy influence from pre-Christian pagan festivals and a very good injection of pure capitalism into the mix that we now know as Christmas.Firstly, although December 25th is marked as the day that Jesus Christ was born it is also the day when the most important gods in the religions of Ishtar and Mithra had their birthdays. The Romans also had important winter festivals including the Saturnalia – apparently, w...