Changing ways we mark festive season in Aotearoa
"Last year, a friend of mine had her first no-gift Christmas with her family and children. It was not easy to do and feelings of guilt crept in, but it is becoming more important for some whanau to challenge the status quo and live more authentically."
It is the last weekend before Christmas and if you are anything like me, you are not yet organised and will be rushing around today getting ready for the holidays and buying enough presents to make sure your children wake up happy on Christmas morning.
My two little boys, Paora, 6, and Richie, 4, get very excited about Christmas these days and this year I have been given a list of present ideas that include Minecraft Lego, a dancing Sloth toy named Fifi and best of all, a Yeti. My baby Richie wants a Yeti for Christmas.
Clearly, this is a problem as there have not been any sightings of Yeti in Aotearoa for some time now. Everywhere I look online is out of Yeti teddies or they will not arrive before Christmas, so the pressure is on – or is it?
No matter how much I mentally prepare for this time of year, I am always sucked into this idea that I must buy my children everything and more as if the size and cost of a present reflects how much I love them.
That is absolute rubbish of course but with all the Christmas media hype and advertising, it can be impossible to shake the feeling that you are not buying enough for them or that the kid next door will get something way cooler and your kids will be upset.
Christmas is terrible for putting huge pressure on families to buy gifts and spend up large. Every year, I psyche myself up to reject all the capitalism and consumerismdriven garbage. I tell myself, “not too many toys for the boys”. They have enough junk. They already lack appreciation for the things they have, and I do not want them to be spoiled.
But without fail, the plan to only buy four presents turns to six or seven and then we add a Christmas stocking or Santa Sack (because the kids have to think that Santa loves them too) and then there’s gifts for their cousins and family and everything blows out of proportion again. Christmas can be stressful and the focus on presents
as a sign of love is not the one.
I have been interested to see some families shifting away from marking Christmas in the traditional way, with people more and more recognising that they have no real ties to the occasion.
There are Kiwi families who are not Christian who are rethinking the way they celebrate the season, and families who are turned off by Christmas because of all the pressure and focus on presents.
Last year, a friend of mine had her first no-gift Christmas with her family and children. It was not easy to do and feelings of guilt crept in, but it is becoming more important for some whanau to challenge the status quo and live more authentically.
I am seeing this a lot more in wha¯nau Ma¯ori, with a resurgence in people wanting to centre their lives on more traditional, cultural, practices. Some wha¯nau are dropping the word Christmas and Santa from their vocabulary altogether this year and shifting the focus of their celebration to Hine Raumati, the Summer
Maiden. For them, the time is about planting kai and spending time with family, as well as visiting urupa¯. Not buying presents.
Reclaiming Ma¯ori calendar events is an act of decolonisation and a healthy step for many families to realign themselves with Ma¯ori markers of health and wellbeing, choosing instead to live by the Maramataka or Ma¯ori lunar calendar which is growing in popularity and uptake.
For example, more people now refer to January 1 as the Pa¯keha¯ New Year, because the rising of Pu¯anga and Matariki in June is traditionally when Ma¯ori mark the New Year. The Government’s promise to introduce a public holiday at Matariki is a positive step and a well overdue sign of respect for Ma¯ori customs and traditions, and it supports Ma¯ori to centre their lives on what is important to them.
I commend those who are brave enough to completely reject the pressure that Christmas puts on families and adopt a more authentic approach to marking the holidays. It is important that we understand that there are other – just as good and valid – ways of living in Aotearoa.
Our Christmases are usually spent with my Mclachlan side of the family. About 30-40 of us spend the day together sharing kai and having a drink. But this year, we will be spending Christmas at our marae with our Teki side of the whanau and I am very much looking forward to that too.
Whatever you do, take it easy and enjoy yourselves. It has been a huge and challenging year from Covid-19 and lockdown, our elections, the nail-biting elections in the United States, the Black
Lives Matter protests erupting worldwide and our individual hardships and loss of loved ones. This will be the first Christmas without any of my grandparents after losing both my Nanna Mclachlan and Nanna Teki this year.
If there was ever a Christmas where we collectively deserved a break, it is this one. Happy holidays.