What are Christmas and other days of celebration called in the UK? The UK equivalent of a U.S. "holiday"?

Christmas, New year, Easter, Halloween, Diwali Those celebrations are actually called what they are. We do not celebrate the *winter holiday* we celebrate Christmas etc etc. Even Muslims wish you Happy Christmas! Unlike the USA, where the actual celebration is just known simply as any *holiday* which takes the meaning out of it completely! We are not ashamed or afraid to celebrate those celebrations and when the Hindus celebrate Diwali, we call it Diwali, when the rest of us celebrate Christmas or Easter, we call it Christmas or Easter. When Muslims celebrate EID and Ramadan, we call it that! Not hard and is very inclusive!

Yes,they're called holidays as well.

As others have said, we generally call festivals by their real name. Also, "a holiday" is what you call a vacation, and "the holidays" is a term for things like the Christmas period.

A break from work or school ;We call them holiday but school children would put the reason in front. Such as christmas holiday, summer holiday etc .

We call it 'Christmas' or 'New Year'............the festive season.......which comes fom 'feast'............we have public holidays, ...which is from 'Holy day' and a day given by the Government to attend church ( in the past) bank holidays, where the Banks are closed which in the past was a shut down of commerce/industry............summer holidays..when the factories in industrial britain closed to enable the workers to have a break and still some towns have these fixed holidays like the first 2 weeks in July which coincides with school holidays so the whole family can go on holiday without being off school or work. School has terms...3 terms broken by hoidays Easter Break, Summer Holidays ( about 5-7 weeks approx) and Christmas/New Year, but also has public hildays such as 'Whitsun' for the Christian festival of Pentecost, the seventh Sunday after Easter, which commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit upon Christ's disciples. 'May Day' on May 1 is an ancient northern hemisphere spring festival and usually a public holiday

Any day on which we do not go to work/School (except weekends) is called a holiday - so Christmas is "Christmas Holiday", New year is "New years day holiday" - other days throughout the year are known as "Bank Holidays" - also when we go away it is called a holiday (because we are not at Work/School) . We do not differentiate between days off and vacations - they are all holidays away from work/School

School kids gets six weeks off in the summer, or the summer holidays, when we go away to stay at a different place than our house, we call this a holiday, or our summer holiday, which is your version of vacation. Its shortened to just holiday rather than summer holiday, only because usually most people go on their travels in the summer. People will say "where are you going on your holidays this year." A holiday to us means going away somewhere, we don't really say "what are you doing for THE holidays" like you guys do, we would say "what are you doing for Christmas or Easter or for New years." A bank holiday however is something different, its an extra day off work, like easter monday, or the royal wedding. We call that a bank holiday. Also like someone else mentioned, we are refusing to be PC about the whole "happy holidays" thing. Its christmas so we will say Happy Christmas. We don't really like the term "happy holidays".

As well as Christmas day, the 26th December is Boxing Day in the UK which is a holiday, if either day falls on the weekend, as it does this year we get the Monday & Tuesday as holidays as well, also 1th Jan, we don't have a Veterans day holiday, we have St Georges day for England, St David for Wales, St Patrick for Ireland and St Andrew for Scotland but none of these are public holidays.

We refer to them mostly by name, Christmas Day & Boxing Day, then (in Scotland anyway) Hogmanay and Ne'erday (New Years Eve and Day) the Easter Holidays, Summer Holidays, and Bank Holidays, and in Scotland we have a public holiday for St Andrews Day.