Аракин 4 курс полностью

A custom is a traditional practice, a mode of individual behaviour or a habit of social 
life — that is transmitted by word of mouth or imitation, then ingrained by social 
pressure, common usage and parental authority. When customs are associated with 
holidays they become calendar customs, and when such events are celebrated annually 
by a whole community they become festivals.
In a sense transmitting folklore is itself a custom. Storytell-ing, ballad-singing, riddle-
posing, game and prank playing and the like are all customary acts, for their survival 
depends on tradition rather than on official control.
Most true folk customs in the US are associated with special events, especially those 
that require rites of passage — birth, marriage, and death. They begin at once when a 
child is born. Boy babies are customarily dressed in blue, and girls in pink.
Celebrations of birthday anniversaries may begin as early as the first year in some 
families and they may continue through one's entire life. More commonly, however, 
birthday parties are dropped at about high school age sometimes to be revived once at the 
symbolic age of maturity (21 years) and again as an annual celebration in later middle 
age. Children's birthdays almost invariably are the occasion for spanking — one spank 
for each year, with extras "to grow in", or "for good measure". Children in some regions 
maintain a fairly rigid schedule of extra-punishment days before and after the birthday 
anniversary — "pinch day", "hit day", "kiss day" and so forth.

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Практический курс английского языка. 4 курс под ред. В.Д. Аракина
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Birthday gift at a party may be held over the head of the celebrating child for him to 
guess the donor or to announce the use to which he intends to put that gift. For each 
correct guess he is granted a wish.
The loss of "baby teeth" is one of the few other non-holiday occasions in a child's life 
when customs are followed.
Courtship and engagement begin a new round of customs that lead to a grand final at 
marriage, the most tradition-regulated personal ceremony in American life.
Wedding customs begin with the "shower" often several of them, to emphasize 
different kinds of needed gifts.
Customs of the wedding itself are numerous and largely regulated by tradition. They 
include the dress of participants, the seating of guests, the choice of attendants, kissing 
the bride, throwing rice, passing the bride's shoe around for money, playing pranks on the 
married couple, and decorating the car.
Wedding customs, however rough, are essentially celebration of a happy time. But 
customs associated with death are generally fraught with suggestions of fear or 
superstition.
From youth to old age, at work and at play, in school and in widening arches of our 
orbits, from the country with which we identify, we encounter folk traditions, customs, 
recipes, memories, sayings and allusions that in^sum constitute a yearly folklore brew.
Only by turning to the folklore of peoples, probing into its meanings and functions, and 
searching for links between different bodies of tradition may we hope to understand the 
intellectual and spiritual life of man in its broadest dimensions.