American Holidays and Traditions

I am going to talk about American traditions and first of all I have to tell you that I found it quite difficult to justify what is a tradition or not. Firstly, traditions vary from place to place and with the USA being such a huge country it is just natural that there are other traditions in the north than there are in the south. So I tried to find traditions that are spread across the country or at least known across the fifty states. Secondly, there are traditions that have a history and used to be big one day, but lost their importance as time went by. I tried to pick the traditions that are of importance to the average American citizen. That means that I will leave out holidays like President's day, where people know that it is a holiday, but it does not really matter to them except if they get off school. So please excuse if I will leave out things you consider important or experienced differently. I will now just go through the year 2001 and talk about the holidays as they fall.