(n.) An annual church festival (December 25) and in some States a legal holiday, in memory of the birth of Christ, often celebrated by a particular church service, and also by special gifts, greetings, and hospitality.
Example Sentences:
(1) In the bars of Antwerp and the cafes of Bruges, the talk is less of Christmas markets and hot chocolate than of the rising cost of financing a national debt which stands at 100% of annual national income.
(2) Would people feel differently about it if, for instance, it happened on Boxing Day or Christmas Eve?
(3) Having been knocked out of the League Cup and Cup Winners' Cup before Christmas, they lost an FA Cup fourth-round replay at West Brom on 1 February.
(4) The pressure is ramping up on Asda boss Andy Clarke, who next week will reveal the chain’s sales performance for the quarter covering Christmas.
(5) Just before Christmas the independent Kerslake report severely criticised Birmingham city council for its dysfunctional politics and, in particular, its handling of the so-called Trojan Horse affair, in which school governors were said to have set out to bring about an Islamic agenda into the curriculum contents and the day-to-day running of some schools.
(6) Other Christmas favourites, including stollen, organic mince pies and Schweppes tonic will also be included among 100 seasonal products on the list of 1,000 items which shoppers can choose from over the next few months.
(7) Following its success, Littleloud created a version of the game for Apple's iPad, launched onto the App Store at Christmas.
(8) The "Dream Toys" for Christmas list includes a few old favourites alongside some new, and sparkly, additions.
(9) It is deeply moving hearing him talk now – as if from the grave – about a Christmas Day when he felt so frustrated and cut-off from his family that he had to go into the office to escape.
(10) As well as stocking second-hand items for purchase, charity shops such as Oxfam have launched Christmas gifts to provide specific help for poor communities abroad.
(11) On the 18th I will be sitting down to the university Christmas meal two hours after the results are passed on to me.
(12) Senior executives at Network Rail are likely to be summoned to Westminster to explain the engineering overruns that caused chaos for Christmas travellers over the weekend.
(13) I tried desperately hard not to influence her, but I did steer her away from a baby that I've already bought her for her Christmas present.
(14) Perhaps it’s the lot of people like my colleagues here in the centre and me to wrestle with our consciences, shed tears, lose sleep and try to make the best of a very bad, heart-breaking job and leave the rest of the world to party, get pissed and celebrate Christmas.
(15) Matt Busby used to say to us that if we were six points off the lead at Christmas we would win the league.
(16) When the owners of Manchester City finally managed to persuade Pep Guardiola to oversee the next stage of their masterplan it is fair to say they probably did not expect to be approaching Christmas scuffling with a team of Watford’s limitations for their first league win at home in almost three months.
(17) It should see the Arctic 30 home in time for Christmas.
(18) The Christmas theme doesn't end there; "America's Christmas Hometown" also has Santa's Candy Castle, a red-brick building with turrets that was built by the Curtiss Candy Company in the 1930s and sells gourmet candy canes in abundance.
(19) Justice League, a followup to Dawn of Justice featuring Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman, arrives in May 2017, with a film starring Flash and the Green Lantern debuting the following Christmas.
(20) The TV campaign, created by ad agency Leo Burnett, uses imagery and motifs more closely associated with Christmas than summer.
Epiphany
Definition:
(n.) An appearance, or a becoming manifest.
(n.) A church festival celebrated on the 6th of January, the twelfth day after Christmas, in commemoration of the visit of the Magi of the East to Bethlehem, to see and worship the child Jesus; or, as others maintain, to commemorate the appearance of the star to the Magi, symbolizing the manifestation of Christ to the Gentles; Twelfthtide.
Example Sentences:
(1) Photograph: Warner Bros His first epiphany came during a high school version of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel in the high school auditorium before 1,500 people.
(2) If it felt like an epiphany for Benn, it was more like a Sermon on the Mount to his Labour colleagues.
(3) In the film, Gould says that he knows he cannot beat death; indeed, his acceptance of its approach is at the root of his epiphany.
(4) For Demirtaş, the Diyarbakir killings were an epiphany of the kind that hundreds of thousands of Kurds have experienced over the past 40 years – generally in response to a government atrocity.
(5) I don't know of any recent astronauts who've had an epiphany based on space travel."
(6) But as my adult-onset acne continued to get worse and worse – and more resistant to medication – I had an epiphany.
(7) Talking with Hebden as he chats about making music, or the feeling in the room as he DJed that final night of Plastic People, you notice how he describes his life as a series of little epiphanies.
(8) Osborne gets lost In an interview with the Guardian’s editor-in-chief, Kath Viner, George Osborne admitted to an unusual epiphany on getting to know the north.
(9) Late, late has been their epiphany, but still too late for this year.
(10) This professional epiphany was mirrored by a challenge to his family life when his son Kai (Markram has five children from two marriages) was diagnosed with Asperger's, an autism spectrum disorder.
(11) The capacity to inspire epiphany in others is a life-changing gift.
(12) His explanation for the leap is that he had an epiphany when he was in his last year of Stanford, when one of his younger brothers came out as gay.
(13) When I was 56 we went to New England on holiday and I had an epiphany.
(14) I had at least two life epiphanies during Where Dreams Go to Die, which contains maybe my favourite lyric of all time: “I regret the day your ugly carcass caught my eye”.
(15) Were it not for the PKK, which Öcalan launched with the murder of two Turkish soldiers in 1984, it is possible that the forced assimilation of the Kurds into mainstream Turkish society would have advanced much further, and the epiphanies of Demirtaş and others may not have happened.
(16) Making commitments now risks overcompensation for households and adding significantly to the cost of household assistance.” Tony Abbott's GST 'epiphany' has been a long time in the works Read more The New South Wales Coalition government led the charge for increasing the GST to help fund the shortfall in health funding, while the Victorian and Queensland Labor governments suggested the Medicare levy as a fairer alternative .
(17) Intriguingly, it was not the prospect of Lebedev, bearing a vast bouquet of P45s, that caused alarm in the blogosphere, but a handful of Liddle's hundreds of columns, such as a grotesque ad feminam attack in the Spectator which was, for many of us, an epiphany, the first moment we had ever felt warmly towards Harriet Harman.
(18) "When I saw there was a whole system of science based on genetics, of serious work in the evolutionary pattern, that was an epiphany.
(19) But no sign yet that the Davos set is worrying unduly: by Epiphany – 6 January – FTSE 100 chief executives had already earned more than a year of the average wage .
(20) T he moment that changed James Watt’s life – his beer epiphany, which he recalls with surprising (or well-rehearsed) precision – did not arrive in the most auspicious venue: “It was a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale from the States, bought at Tesco’s in Stonehaven, to wash down some fish and chips.