Signposts - a blog about Te Ara the Encyclopedia of New Zealand

Christmas is a loaded word but what does it mean in an increasingly secular time? The first thing I do with a question nowadays is plug some keywords into a search box. So I typed ‘Christmas’ into the Te Ara search box and trawled through what it spat out.

For some it is about religion. Christianity came to the Bay of Islands on Christmas Day in 1814 with the arrival of Anglican missionary Samuel Marsden. As a 10-year old immigrant on her way to New Zealand Dorothy Fenton remembered calling in at Pitcairn Island on Christmas Day 1920. She remembered islanders rowing out but refusing money for their goods as it was the Sabbath (the Pitcairn Islanders weren’t so righteous a few generations later).

Drinking with mates, 1976

For others the Kiwi Christmas is about food and drink. When Adeline Vera Taylor arrived in Lyttleton as a child on Christmas Eve 1906, the lady at their boarding house gave her a piece of Christmas pudding. During the Second World War parcels from home containing dried seafood were sent to men of the Māori Battalion stationed in Italy. The Christmas picnic morphed from the genteel in 1915 to the blokefest of 1976. The work Christmas party is still pretty much about booze as these 1970s workers illustrate. Yet Christmas has also changed as many work through the holiday period saving such waste as these dumped snapper which could not be processed as the factory was closed. For trampers the break means the opportunity for a long tramp often dubbed the Christmas trip.

Kowhai Christmas card

And what of symbols? New Zealand’s Christmas tree is the pōhutukawa yet northern hemisphere holly and even kowhai (though it is a spring flower) appear on old Christmas cards. Even the bombing of Crete has a yuletide flavour. A world war earlier, in 1917 German prisoner of war count Felix von Luckner a.k.a. ‘the Sea Devil’ escaped from Motuihe, offshore from Auckland using the ruse of a Christmas play. And in 1995 Enty Masun played the part of Jesus in a nativity play. Not a Māori Jesus as James K. Baxter envisioned, but a Samoan one.

It’s a random approach as any plugging a term into a search box but it seems fitting in our digital age. What’s Christmas all about then – well I guess in the end it’s a good time not to be a turkey.