Holiday seasons : Christmas, New Year and Easter in nineteenth-century New Zealand / Alison Clarke.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 171-185) and index.

Introduction: Seasonal Celebrations and the Making of New Zealand Culture -- 1. Christmas -- 2. New Year -- 3. Easter -- Conclusion: The Evolution of the New Zealand Holiday.

"In this book Alison Clarke shows how colonial settlers from the northern hemisphere adapted the age-old festivals of Christmas, New Year and Easter to a new world of upside-down seasons, unfamiliar vegetation and cultural diversity. They decorated their homes with pohutukawa at Christmas and ate green peas and new potatoes, they went to the races at New Year and on hunting trips at Easter. But they still ate plum pudding on 25 December, went fist footing at New Year and observed Easter with traditional services and hot cross buns. Catholics and Anglicans, Methodists and Presbyterians had different priorities in celebrating Christian festivals, and the friction between those who wanted a day off to picnic and those who wanted to worship at church was integral to the development of these holidays in New Zealand. Similarly, we owe many of our festive customs to the differences between the English, Irish and Scottish ways of celebrating their holidays."--BOOK JACKET.