Easter traditions in my family

The Ukrainian Easter day is, actually, a culmination of a long trial of preparing for this beautiful holiday. The last Sunday before Easter (Palm Sunday) is called Willow Sunday (Verbna nedilia). On a week before the Easter pussy-willow branches are blessed in the church.

The major event of the Ukrainian Ester is the night church service. My parents usually go to church in the evening to be present during the whole service – until early morning. At the same time, many prefer to come for the culmination of the service, in the morning.
People gather in the church for the Easter vigil till the very morning when priests bless the food believers brought. Bread (paskas), eggs, meat and sausages are waiting to get blessed for the Easter dinner.  After that people go home to celebrate Easter with their families.

When parents come home from church we put all blessed food on the holiday table, pray and start to taste the food with the words: "Christ is risen!" – "Risen indeed".

The specially-baked Easter bread, called paska, hasgreat symbolic significance in Ukraine. My mother bakes the tastiest paska I`ve ever ate.

Ukrainians have a bright and beautiful tradition of painting eggs for Easter. While some people simply paint them one color, others prepare masterpieces: traditional patterns, ornaments, and pictures painted on boiled eggs. Such decorated eggs are called “krashanky” (painted one color) or “pysanky” (colorful eggs with patterns and pictures). Eggs are also traditionally painted on Friday before Easter. In our family we mostly just paint them one color.

After festive breakfast me, my husband and our daughter go to visit my husband`s granny.

SPRING SESSION: Media News on Case Study

A case study is an in-depth study of one person. Much of Freud's work and theories were developed through individual case studies.

In a case study, nearly every aspect of the subject's life and history is analyzed to seek patterns and causes for behavior. The hope is that learning gained from studying one case can be generalized to many others. Unfortunately, case studies tend to be highly subjective and it is difficult to generalize results to a larger population.

In the social sciences and life sciences, a case study (or case report) is a descriptive, exploratory or explanatory analysis of a person, group or event. An explanatory case study is used to explore causation in order to find underlying principles. Case studies may be prospective (in which criteria are established and cases fitting the criteria are included as they become available) or retrospective (in which criteria are established for selecting cases from historical records for inclusion in the study).

Types of Case Studies

·      Explanatory: Used to do causal investigations.

·      Exploratory: A case study that is sometimes used as a prelude to further, more in-depth research. This allows researchers to gather more information before developing their research questions and hypotheses.

·      Descriptive: Involves starting with a descriptive theory. The subjects are then observed and the information gathered is compared to the pre-existing theory.

·      Intrinsic: A type of case study in which the researcher has a personal interest in the case.

·      Collective: Involves studying a group of individuals.

·      Instrumental: Occurs when the individual or group allows researchers to understand more than what is initially obvious to observers.

There are some links with media news on case study:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/hubs/gapyear/10234454/Gap-year-case-study-learning-a-language.html 

 http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/public/timesappeal/article3470091.ece

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/business/money/Consumer/article1301253.ece 

http://writing.colostate.edu/guides/guide.cfm?guideid=60 

where you can find theoretical information about case studies

SPRING SESSION: Meals

Britains have mostly breakfast, lunch, dinner and supper. It is a little different then we have because we eat three times a day. For breakfast they usually have a cup of tea or coffee, rolls and butter. But others like porridge or cornflakes with milk or cream and sugar, bacon and eggs. Their breakfast is at the same time as us is.

They have lunch about 1.00 p.m. (we have dinner at that time). It is almost impossible for Englishman to come home for lunch.  They make it at home and take with themselves. It can be  cold meat, potatoes, salad and pickles, with a pudding or fruit to follow. Sometimes Englishman has a mutton chop, or steak and chips, followed by biscuits and cheese, and some people like a glass of light beer with lunch.

   Afternoon tea you can hardly call a meal, but it is a sociable sort of thing, as friends often come in then for a chat while they have their cup of tea, cake or biscuit.

Tea making in England is an art. The hostess first of all rinses the teapot with boiling water (this is called 'warming the pot') before adding four or five teaspoonfuls of tea. The amount of tea varies, of course, according to the number of people present. The pot is then filled with boiling water and covered by a tea-cosy to allow the tea to infuse for five minutes. English people seldom put lemon juice or rum in their tea, usually they have it with milk.

A typical British meal for dinner is "meat and two veg". They put hot brown gravy, (traditionally made from the juices of the roast meat, but more often today from a packet!) on the meat and usually the vegetables. One of the vegetables is almost always potatoes.

Sunday lunch time is a typical time to eat the traditional Sunday Roast. Traditionally it consists of roast meat, (cooked in the oven for about two hours), two different kinds of vegetables and potatoes with a Yorkshire pudding. The most common joints are beef, lamb or pork; chicken is also popular.

SPRING SESSION: Illnesses and their treatment

We all want to be healthy. But nowadays it is very difficult to do.

There are many temptations in our life, they interfere us to lead a healthy lifestyle. Every day we hear about various germs, illnesses and that doctors couldn`t find medicines against them. And according to that I think that we have a big problem with treatment.  Almost every doctor prescribes antibiotics even someone has simply running nose. I think that there are many other ways to treat (staying at home, drinking teas, lying under warm blanket and so on). But this is the first aspect of our problems with the health.

Second is our food. Many years ago our ancestors should hunt for their food but now in many ways life got easier. When we go shopping we can find whatever we want to eat. Even such stuffs that we haven`t heard before. Everything is cooked and done by someone else. And one day we could realize that we and especially our children would grow up with various problems with the health. We should live better.

Another problem is that people don’t want to move enough. According to this we have problems with our weight.

So to stay healthy we should move more, eat healthy meals and drinks, try to stay in a good mood, to treat with medicines in extreme cases. BE HEALTHY!