English squeamishness about money can be a problem in this context, particularly for the upper-middle and upper classes, who are especially sensitive about it. Talking about how much a Christmas present cost is regarded as terribly vulgar; actually telling someone the price of their present, or even that it was 'expensive', would be crass beyond belief. Although general, non-specific complaints about the cost of Christmas presents are allowed, harping on and on about the financial aspects of gift-exchange is uncouth and inconsiderate, as it makes recipients of gifts feel awkward.
Actual expenditure on Christmas presents seems to be inversely related to income, with poor, working-class families tending to give more lavish gifts, especially to children, often going heavily into debt in the process. The middle classes (particularly the 'interfering classes') tut-tut sanctimoniously over this, and congratulate themselves on their superior prudence, while tucking in to their overpriced organic vegetables and admiring the tasteful Victorian ornaments on their tree.
New Year's Eve and the Orderly-disorder Rule
New Year's Eve, which more of us will admit to enjoying (although some of the bah-humbug brigade make the same complaints every year about the boring sameness of it all) is a more straightforward carnival - with all the usual, standard liminal stuff: cultural remission, legitimized deviance, festive inversions, altered states of consciousness, communitas and so on - and it is more obviously a direct descendant of pagan mid-winter festivals, uncluttered by Christian meddling with the imagery or sanitization of the rituals.
As with Freshers' Week, office Christmas parties and most other English carnival rites, the extent of actual debauchery and anarchy tends to be greatly overestimated, both by the puritanical killjoys who disapprove of such festivities and by those participants who like to see themselves as wild, fun-loving rebels. In reality, our New-Year's-Eve drunken debauchery is a fairly orderly sort of disorder, in which only certain specified taboos may be broken, only the usual designated inhibitions may be shed, and the standard rules of English drunken etiquette apply: mooning but not flashing; fighting but not queue-jumping; bawdy jokes but not racist ones; 'illicit' flirting and, in some circles, snogging, but not adulterous sex; promiscuity but not, if you are straight, homosexuality, nor heterosexual lapses if you are gay; vomiting and (if male) urinating in the street, but never defecating; and so on.
Minor Calendricals - Commas and Semi-colons
And as New Year's Eve is understood to be the most debauched and disinhibited of our calendrical rites, the rest (Hallowe'en, Guy Fawkes' Night, Easter, May Day, Valentine's, etc.) tend to be pretty tame - although they all have their origins in much more boisterous pagan festivals.
Our May Day, with staid, respectable, usually middle-aged Morris Dancers and the occasional innocent children's maypole, is a revival of the ancient pagan rites of Beltane. In some parts of the country, counter-culture/New Age revellers with dreadlocks, beads and multiple body-piercings celebrate May Day alongside the Morris Dancers and the Neighbourhood-Watch/Parish-Council types - an odd-looking juxtaposition, but generally amicable. Hallowe'en - fancy-dress and sweets - is a descendant of All Souls' Eve, a festival of communion with the dead, also of pagan origin and celebrated in various forms in many cultures around the world.
The practice of lighting bonfires and burning effigies in early November is another pagan one - common at 'fire festivals' welcoming the winter (the effigies represented the old year) - adapted in the seventeenth century to commemorate the defeat of Guy Fawkes's plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament. It is still also known as Bonfire Night and Fireworks Night66, and is now celebrated with firework-parties over a period of at least a fortnight, rather than just on the night of the 5th of November. Valentine's Day - cards, flowers, chocolate - is a sanitized Christian version of the Ancient Roman festival of Lupercalia, originally held on the 15th February, which was a much more raunchy celebration of the 'coming of spring' (in other words, the start of the mating season) designed to ensure the fertility of fields, flocks and people.
Many people think of Easter as one of the few genuinely Christian calendricals, but even its name is not Christian, being a variant of Eostre, the Saxon goddess of spring, and many of our Easter customs - eggs and so on - are based on pagan fertility rites. Some otherwise non-practising Christians may go to a church service on Easter Sunday, and even some totally non-religious people 'give something up' for the traditional fasting period of Lent (it's a popular time to restart one's New-Year's-Resolution diet, which somehow lost its momentum by the third week in January).
As calendrical punctuation marks go, these are mostly just commas. Easter qualifies as a semi-colon, as it involves a day's holiday from work, and is used as a reference point - people talk about doing things 'by Easter' or 'after Easter', or something happening 'around Easter'. Valentine's Day also just about counts as a semi-colon, although we don't get a day off work, as it plays a significant part in our courtship and mating practices (significant enough to cause a big peak in the suicide rates, anyway).
In addition to these 'mainstream' national calendricals, every English ethnic and religious minority has its own annual punctuation marks: the Hindu Divali and Janamashtami; the Sikh Divali and Vaisakhi; Muslim Ramadan, Eid-Ul-Fitr and Al-Hijra; Jewish Chanukkah, Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashana, to name just the first few that immediately spring to mind. And every English sub-culture has its own calendricals - its own annual tribal gatherings and festivals. These include the upper-class 'Season', of which the Royal Ascot race-meeting, the Henley Regatta and Wimbledon tennis championships (always abbreviated to just 'Ascot, Henley and Wimbledon') are the principal events. The racing fraternity have the Grand National, the Cheltenham Festival and the Derby in addition to Ascot; Goths have their annual Convention at Whitby in Yorkshire; New Agers, other counter-culture groups and young music-lovers have their Festival at Glastonbury; Modern Druids have the Summer Solstice at Stonehenge; the literati have Hay-on-Wye; opera-lovers have Glyndebourne and Garsington; dog-lovers have Crufts; bikers have the BMF Show at Peterborough; horsey folk have Badminton, Hickstead and the Horse of the Year Show; and so on. There are thousands of these sub-cultural calendricals, far too many to list, but each one, to its adherents, may be much more important than Christmas. And I have only mentioned the 'Christmases' - every sub-culture has its own minor calendricals as well, its own semi-colons and commas.
But even the minor punctuation marks are necessary: we need these special days, these little mini-festivals, to provide breaks from our routine and give structure to our year - just as regular mealtimes structure our days. That's 'we humans', of course, not just 'we English', but we English do seem to have a particular need for regular 'time out' from our rigid social controls.