In which she concedes to Christmas

[zeborah]

Someone's opinion piece in the newspaper suggested that we could stop shops starting Christmas too early by inventing a Kiwi seasonal holiday to celebrate around about now instead. She then created and elaborated on one but I'd tuned out because:

a) we already have two seasonal holidays around about now: as much as I dislike the importation of Halloween it is very much a thing, and as much as I'd prefer to commemorate Parihaka on the 5th of November than celebrate Guy Fawkes, that is very much a thing too (albeit its commercial aspects are somewhat more circumscribed by law). And

b) the existence of these holidays has demonstrably done nothing to prevent shops starting with the Christmas already. The instance that particularly horrified me the other day was walking into my local supermarket through the gauntlet of Halloween, and a few minutes later walking to the checkout through the gauntlet of Advent calendars.

Halloween then Guy Fawkes then Christmas, I ragetweeted.

And then yesterday morning, when I went out to pick some lettuce for my lunch sandwiches, I discovered that the Christmas lilies are poking their weird anenome heads out of the ground among the remains of the daffodils.

So, fine. The garden has spoken. Christmas is coming.

Comments

[choirwoman]

Inventing extra holidays has never worked to draw attention from existing holidays, anyway. In the best case, it means there are more holidays.

[heliopausa]

Thanks for the mention of Parihaka, which was new to me.

[ex_heleninwales860]

You could always combine celebrating Parihaka and Bonfire Night (as we always called it in the North of England) very successfully. The whole point is not to celebrate Guy Fawkes, but to burn him in effigy. This point hasn't always been stressed in recent years because it traditionally involved a lot of anti-Catholic feeling.

However, it's long been traditional to burn effigies of unpopular people on the 5th of November, eg Maggie Thatcher, so having a bonfire and burning an effigy of John Bryce would be a nod to the old country and a way of remembering how the people were treated at Parihaka.

[zeborah]

It wouldn't work in New Zealand where by and large the history of Guy Fawkes is irrelevant to the holiday, which is merely an excuse to make things explode prettily. We don't do bonfires (oh my god the fire risk) or effigies, only fireworks, and it's all about the spectacle. So in effect it's a celebration of "Look, I make boom!" which wouldn't go with Parihaka at all.

Also I suspect (though speaking as a Pākehā so on the wrong side to be making any pronouncements) that burning John Bryce would miss the point that this was very much a government-sanctioned genocide: yes, Bryce in many respects went further than anyone else, but the government/Pākehā have spent a good two centuries attempting to dispossess Māori of their land and culture and language in all sorts of ways that have been, while on the surface less blatant, in effect little less evil.

[(Anonymous)]

Always listen to the flowers.

[(Anonymous)]

(Er, Mary Anne in Kentucky on an iPod)

[graydon]

Christmas makes retailers a lot of money, in ways no other holiday accomplishes.

If you want to keep Christmas displays in temporal bounds, you need to either make some other season what carries a retailer through the year, invent another major present-giving holiday so that Christmas stops being a retail observance, or increase the general prosperity so greatly that hardly any retailer is actually depending on Christmas to save them.

I certainly wouldn't care to have to accomplish any of those and I doubt you would, either.

[green_knight]

Here, Halloween is an interruption of Christmas. Christmas stuff starts coming in, it is momentarily (and only partly) displaced by Halloween, and then swallows the world. Or something.

[deird1]

You guys celebrate Guy Fawkes? Cool!