At this time of year...

Hello

Today I’m going to write you about Christmas. This is a celebration that has a place en almost every part of the world. It remembers the day that Jesus Christ was born. This date has a lot of meaning for Jewish and Catholic persons, because is the day that their prophet was born.

People around the world celebrate it with symbols (like Santa Claus, the Christmas tree, and the Nativity scene) and rites (like Christmas dinner or midnight mass). Some of the most important elements for Christmas actually are the gifts. Everyone goes crazy buying gifts at this time of the year, especially for kids.

To me, Christmas is a family day. I’m not a believer, so to me it doesn’t have a religious meaning. But my mom loves Christmas, I don’t know why, she doesn’t believe, neither. She likes to invite my big bother with his son and my dad’s sister with her two kids. Sometimes there are more guests, but at least is us. We have dinner, all good dressed and after that we open the gifts. But it doesn’t end here. We stay until late drinking wine and talking.

To me every year Christmas is losing importance. When I was a kid I loved the gifts, but know I don’t care too much. Like I said before to me it doesn’t have a religious meaning. And it’s true that gets family together and everything but I don’t believe it should be necessary a holiday for that. Besides, now people is only interest in buying gifts so if sometimes it has another meaning I think it lost it at all. So I could say that I like Christmas because I have a good time, but the meaning that it taking lately I hate it and I think is ridiculous.

Anyway Merry Christmas  

This weird term

Hello, I’m Manuela Jimenez and I’m coursing my 4^th semester of sociology in the Universidad de Chile.

This term is kind of weird; it started on November and usually does it on July or August. So it will be finish at the end of January and it will last only ten week. I think is a mistake having a semester that short. Because of that, I don’t have too many expectations for this term. We won’t be available to go deep with subjects and all the evaluations will be too close and that will be stressing.

I took six subjects: Statistic III, Sociology theory II, Economy II, Epistemology, Qualitative Techniques I and English IV.

I thought studying in summer/Christmas would be awful, but it was not that bad. I think it is because I like the University and see my friends every day. Anyway it’s kind of sad that all my friends that are not from this University are starting their vacations and I can’t do any plans with them or it’s very complicate.

About this class I don’t know what I would like to do. I think it exceeds my level of creativity, so any ideas I could have, teachers already had it. I think that the thing I would like the most is improve my English level, and learn more vocabulary.