Here in the Colonies, we have the Fourth of July, aka Independence Day. We celebrate with fireworks, cookouts, readings of the Declaration of Independence, and so forth. The point of the holiday is to remember the signing of the Declaration of Independence and American independence.
Does the UK have an equivalent holiday? I thought of Guy Fawkes Day, but that’s not quite the same.
Guy Fawkes Night (or Bonfire Night) is equivalent in the sense that you get bonfires and fireworks, but not in the historical sense. There is no holiday celebrating, say, the signing of the Magna Carta. The closest you’ll probably get is Burns Night in Scotland, which is not an official holiday.
And even then Burns Night is a celebration of a cultural icon - something along the lines of if the US having Twain Nights.
In the Commonwealth countries you have (or had) Dominion Day, which is probably as good an analog as you are going to get. Canada calls it “Canada Day” instead of “Dominion Day” now. I’m not sure what’s done now - when I was a kid Canada had fireworks on July 1.
Guy Fawkes Day is sort of the love child of the American Hallowe’en and Fourth of July – combining bonfires, fireworks, and kids going door to door for handouts. It commemorates the thwarting of the Gunpowder Plot, which was an attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament in aid of the supposed divine right of Catholic monarch James II.
If there were fireworks and celebrations and whatnot for the execution of Charles I, that would be the closest hypothetical equivalent.
Wouldn’t the closest equivalent be fireworks and celebrations for the execution or imprisonment of the regicides 20 years later?
Or the Glorious Revolution of 1688/89. James II kicked out by Parliament, Parliament installs tame monarch, and Britain becomes a constitutional monarchy.
William III of Orange was anything but “tame” - but he came from the Netherlands, which already had a very limited monarchy (in that he wasn’t actually a monarch), and basically ruled the UK the same way.
Well, we went from a guy who considered himself absolute ruler by divine right, to William, who immediately allowed the Bill of Rights to be enacted, which ceded a large chunk of sovereignty to Parliament.
So you could, conceivably, have Bill’s Bill Day? (And then, later, the bill for Bill’s Bill Day.)
There’s always Easter, where we celebrate the liberation of chocolate eggs from a bunny, by eating lots of chocolate eggs.
That’s true - but Will had a very dominent personality, and was no puppet. He just preferred to spend his time fighting Louis XIV and his allies, and let Britain more or less rule itself.
Except that it came before both of those celebrations. Kids do not go door-to-door for handouts. When they make a Guy and call ‘penny for the Guy’ it’s from a spot outside, not door-to-door, and it doesn’t really happen much any more anyway, sadly.
Guy Fawkes’ Night is more an ancestor of Wicker Man burnings than anything else. (Some Wicker Man burnings do still happen, mainly in the South-West).
I don’t think it’s very similar to Independence Day, since it commemorates parliament beating rebels and staying the same rather than an overthrow of a government.
The closest would be the saints’ days in the various UK countries - they’re not celebrations of independence, but they are about all the good facets of being Scottish/etc. St George’s Day is in a slow process of being melded with or possibly usurped by Shakespeare’s birthday celebrations.
The trouble with Guy Fawkes’ Day is that there’s a pretty heavy anti-Catholic component to that, which probably wouldn’t fly in today’s multi-cultural Britain.
The closest equivalent I was going to suggest is the Queen’s Official Birthday, which bears no relation to the Queen’s actual birthday and, like the 4th of July, is essentially an arbitrary date that is celebrated because it comes during a part of the year that has good weather.
There is in its inception, but there isn’t in the way it’s run now. It’s an extremely popular event, even in multicultural Britain.
The Queen’s official birthday is a pretty good contender, with the problem being that nobody except the Queen and a few tourists (and civil servants who get the day off) celebrates it.
ETA: it’s *Night, * not Day (several of you have said Day). It’s also known as simply Bonfire Night or occasionally Fireworks Night.
This non-Protestant (also non-Catholic) Briton happily celebrated Guy Fawkes’ Night as a boy. There really isn’t an anti-Catholic component to it at all, except in the same sense that Hallowe’en has a pro-pagan component.
Close. It was an attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament in aid of ending the reign of anti-Catholic James I. Had it succeeded, the plan was for his Catholic daughter Elizabeth (from whom the Hanoverian dynasty sprang) to take the throne.
Interestingly New Zealand celebrates Guy Fawkes while many in Australia have never heard if it.
True. I didn’t mean the comment to suggest derivation so much as “It’s like a cross between…”
You get a “yahbut” on this one – Both days celebrate a triumph of representative government over a perceived threat of royal tyranny. In the case of the Gunpowder Plot, the perception was in error one way – Catholic absolutism vs. Protestant democracy was how it was then conceived. And America believed that George III and his tame PM Lord North were out to run America as they wished whether we agreed or not. The ins and outs of contemporary English politics escaped us Colonials – we saw it as the Tyranny of King George.
We don’t teach it well because we remember it wrong. Actual independence from Great Britain occurred two days earlier on July 2nd, with the Continental Congress approving Richard Henry Lee’s resolution for independence. It would later be incorporated in the DOI and the whole shebang approved on the Fourth. The public didn’t hear about it until July 8th when the DOI was read in the garden behind the Pennsylvania State House.
But that parchment we all think was signed on the Fourth didn’t exist. It would not be until August 2nd when the engrossed copy was ready for signing. Still, it took almost a decade for all the signers to sign it.