Christmas still a great shared tradition

WHAT other time of year compares with Christmas? Even as New Zealanders become a more diverse lot – in their habits and beliefs, their hairstyles and their musical tastes, their cultures and their foods – Christmas remains the pole around which the calendar turns.

It doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone. For Christians, it is a time coloured with holiness, the baby in the stable a symbol of a God of love signing up to the whole mixed human lot.

For those of other faiths, it is more like background noise – a mirror to their Diwali, or Eid, or Hannukah.

For those who don’t go in for religion, Christmas is still the central secular holiday – a festival of whanau and generosity and relaxation unmatched by any other time of the year. This group is a huge part of the population now; between 2001 and last year, it leapt from 30 per cent to 42 per cent of the population, not far off the 49 per cent in Christian churches.

The season has its frustrations and stresses. The generosity means a blizzard of shopping, a strain on budgets, and a fair bit of waste. (See, for instance, the popular office game ‘‘Secret Santa’’).

Expectations are high, queues are long, family members are opinionated, the whims of the weather crucial.

But none of these hazards can undo the unique fun and pleasure of Christmas. Part of that pleasure is in a certain bowing to ritual: doing things because we’ve done them for years, whether it’s a Christmas roast, or bringing out a tattered stocking, or welcoming the day with a plunge into Wellington harbour.

Some traditions are inherited from the northern hemisphere, where Christmas is all about relief from winter: the carols and candles and Christmas pudding. Others have grown up to match our own season: the ascendancy of the Christmas ham here, the frisbee, the cherries.

Some people will always push back against the whole shebang. Witness the government departments that send out cards bleached of the word ‘‘Christmas’’ – it’s all season’s greetings and happy holidays. Their bid at inoffensiveness ends up being ridiculous, a denial of the obvious: that Christmas, by whatever mix of purpose and accident and momentum, is important here.

And then there are those who wish the season over before it’s begun – the packed calendar, the carousing and all.

For what it’s worth, it’s ever been thus. Take a look at the Evening Post of Christmas Eve, 1912, a fragment of a New Zealand ostensibly much more singular and Christian than ours.

‘‘This is a time,’’ the paper wrote, ‘‘when the great religion of humanity, the religion of the heart, finds adherents outside the churches as well as in them.’’

‘‘Cynics,’’ it continued, ‘‘may affect to sneer at ‘‘stupid custom’’, but something in the air, the vibration from hearts united in friendly joy, touches even the cynics, and they are swept into the merry-making.’’

We might not put it quite like that, but it’s still right. The Dominion Post wishes all of its readers a safe and happy Christmas.