Our public holidays are an odd assortment. Four of them – the ones at Christmas and Easter – are Christian celebrations that were themselves adaptations of pagan festivals. One marks the birthday of an increasingly irrelevant monarch half a world away. Another celebrates the introduction of the 40-hour working week (younger readers, ask your parents). Then there is the set of provincial “anniversary days”, celebrating milestones of colonisation.
Of those with a reasonable claim to being national days that tell us something about the identity of Aotearoa New Zealand, there are three. Anzac Day commemorates – some say celebrates, others say mourns – a disastrous World War I event. Waitangi Day commemorates an agreement between two peoples that was broken almost as soon as it was made. And Matariki, which is only a year old, has its origins in outer space. It’s all very confusing.
One thing they have in common is that, for many of us, they mean a day off work. That itself is a custom with religious origins, based as it is on the biblical day of rest taken by the Almighty as outlined in Genesis 2: 2-3.
Another common characteristic is that they include ritual elements. We do things to “mark the occasion”. One hallmark of a ritual’s efficacy, says Brigitte Bönisch-Brednich, director of the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, Te Herenga Waka, is flexibility.
“That is absolutely vital, for if a ritual loses its
