Unofficial Christ's Hospital Forum

Is Ascension Day celebrated at Horsham? Was it celebrated in the past? We had a whole day's holiday for it and it was a very special day in the school year - much anticipated but then it did not always live up to our hopes!

Depends what you were hoping for, I suppose. Admittedly my experience of Ascension Day was during the post-war austerity. We spent the morning after chapel preparing for a "picnic" (hunks of bread and jam, and school buns). We trailed up the road for what seemed like hours, it was usually cold and/or damp. After the glorious afternoon we returned for tea(?) and then provided for each other a ghastly "entertainment" in which everyone was expected to take part. Failing memory mercifully draws a veil over the day in 1's, my first,terrified of everone, year.
What a miserable old bat I am!

Can't remember anything special in Horsham, but I am intrigued by the fact that it is a Bank Holiday in Sweden, yet in Catholic Spain, it is this Sunday.
I wonder why the difference since I always understood it to be 40 days after Easter Sunday.

jhopgood wrote:Can't remember anything special in Horsham, but I am intrigued by the fact that it is a Bank Holiday in Sweden, yet in Catholic Spain, it is this Sunday.
I wonder why the difference since I always understood it to be 40 days after Easter Sunday.

Today is a Bank Holiday in France specifically as Ascension Day despite France now being pretty strictly non-religious. (They can't even have seminaries where priests, Rabbis and the rest are trained and anything else with religious conotations needs a hard to get licence. One Catholic school even moved to England because it's existence in France is not allowed)).

jhopgood wrote:Can't remember anything special in Horsham, but I am intrigued by the fact that it is a Bank Holiday in Sweden, yet in Catholic Spain, it is this Sunday.
I wonder why the difference since I always understood it to be 40 days after Easter Sunday.

Ascension Day is still Thursday in the Catholic calendar but the Mass marking the day is now celebrated on the nearest Sunday rather than the day itself as of two or three years ago.

The same is true of other weekday feasts such as Epiphany and Corpus Christi.

I think the reason is a combination of falling Mass attendances for these midwek Holy Days of Obligation and an increasing shortage of Priests.

Ascension Day is also a holiday in Finland, which is not the most religious of countries - of any persuasion!

According to the school calendar, there was a Festival Eucharist at 8.30am.

Don't recall having a holiday on this day at CH in the 80s...

Here in Luxemburg it's a holiday and as it falls on a Thursday everyone is doing a "pont" and taking Friday off too. Logic as on the manufacturing side it makes no sense for costs to turn off the machines on Wednesday and thurn them back on again just for Friday. So they have the pont and me as a duffer am stuck in the office..writing to you all!

A bit but of course in the US Thanksgiving is the 4th Thursday in November and everyone takes a 'pont' on the Friday. All other holidays are celebrated on a Monday, well except Christmas and New Year of course though Christmas is not a 'religious' holiday as the Founding Fathers wrote that into the Constitution.

Ascension Day is a holiday in Germany. Last year it fell on May 1 (also a holiday), so we lost out.

At Horsham in the 50s I think we had a slightly longer chapel service, which probably meant no PT in the correspondingly shorter morning break.

michael scuffil wrote:Ascension Day is a holiday in Germany. Last year it fell on May 1 (also a holiday), so we lost out.

At Horsham in the 50s I think we had a slightly longer chapel service, which probably meant no PT in the correspondingly shorter morning break.

I think you're right !

Sejintenej wrote:

One Catholic school even moved to England because it's existence in France is not allowed

??? I'm pretty sure that the school in Rennes with which an exchange is arranged every year for LE pupils is an independent Catholic school. The state education system in France is certainly secular though (but I can't see how a state-funded school could have moved to England!).

midget wrote:Depends what you were hoping for, I suppose. Admittedly my experience of Ascension Day was during the post-war austerity. We spent the morning after chapel preparing for a "picnic" (hunks of bread and jam, and school buns). We trailed up the road for what seemed like hours, it was usually cold and/or damp. After the glorious afternoon we returned for tea(?) and then provided for each other a ghastly "entertainment" in which everyone was expected to take part. Failing memory mercifully draws a veil over the day in 1's, my first,terrified of everone, year.
What a miserable old bat I am!

This is just how remember it at Hertford in the late 60's/early 70's.! Times didn't change much there during the 30 years of DR's headship.

I'm glad it wasn't just me!

fra828 wrote:

midget wrote:Depends what you were hoping for, I suppose. Admittedly my experience of Ascension Day was during the post-war austerity. We spent the morning after chapel preparing for a "picnic" (hunks of bread and jam, and school buns). We trailed up the road for what seemed like hours, it was usually cold and/or damp. After the glorious afternoon we returned for tea(?) and then provided for each other a ghastly "entertainment" in which everyone was expected to take part. Failing memory mercifully draws a veil over the day in 1's, my first,terrified of everone, year.
What a miserable old bat I am!

This is just how remember it at Hertford in the late 60's/early 70's.! Times didn't change much there during the 30 years of DR's headship.

There is a picture on here somewhere of a 2's Ascension Day trip to Kenwood in 1970, which was fantastic. I think a lot of it was down to how imaginative the Sixth form was and we had a good one that year. That and the first one (when we went on a double decker bus) are the only two I remember.