Busytown: Trick or treat (Electoween 08)
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re. Matariki..ABSOLUTELY I'll be signing that petition.
One of my problem with winters in NZ has always been the lack a real heartwarming celebration in the middle of winter that cuts the cold/ rainy season in half.+1
Had to look it up to be honest but we should definitely give queens birthday the boot in favour of Matariki. Or just add it.
Could you make lanterns out of kumara? (You can make a really cool one out of a mandarin.)
I think a large, bulbous, growth hormoned kumara would look scarier than any pumpkin even before carving. I bet pungas would make a great scary face carving medium too.
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We were discussing this at a party last night (you have to give the Green Party one thing they do know how to do the 'party' bit right, and have the coolest music) ....
Xmas in summer is something we've made our own, there's no reason to move it to winter
Halloween should be April 30th here - it's a harvest festival (well originally it was a religious fesitval - all hallow's eve - the night before all saints day - moving it to the night before may day is a wonderfull secularisation ....) and it means we get real pumpkins, and spooky darkness
I like the idea of dumping QB weekend in favour of Matariki - it's not like it's even her real birthday - maybe when she croaks people will balk at the thought of changing it to King's Birthday weekend in honour of Charlie and we'll have a chance to remake it in our own image
Here in Dunedin we celebrate both Hogmanay and Matariki - it seems to me like a waste and divisive in the community to do the two celebrations within days of each other - I'd love to see them merge into a single celebration that everyone is welcome and part of
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I like the idea of dumping QB weekend in favour of Matariki
Ah, but then we'd get the Matariki weekend sales and that would make me cry. I agree that it has to be properly reclaimed and rediscovered (nothing in Hamilton to mark it? that's just wrong) but Islander is right, it doesn't need an official stamp to be felt and celebrated. We just need more people to get behind it and talk about it and light bonfires. We also need my son to stop insisting we get up at five in the morning to see it - the adorable little tike.
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Asterix and Obelisk is superb. Nice work...
For an 11 year old, this kid has a sound grasp of the issues.
I misread his no-spaces monkeysortycoons as monkey-sorty-coons which had me concerned for a second or two... Worked out the better placing of those spaces now though!
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"Here in Dundedin we celebrate both Hogmanay and Matariki - it seems to me like a waste and divisive in the community to do the two celebrations within days of each other..."
Ur, did you mean Christmas and Hogmanay?
Hogmanay = the last day of the year
Matariki = the shortest day of the year i.e 21/22 June -
we celebrate mid winter's (I guess as a sort of 'Hogmanay') as one would in the southern hemisphere - I think technically when Matariki is celebrated depends on your Iwi - some actually the rise of the first new moon after the first sighting of the Matariki (the Pleiades), some just on the first sighting - so it moves around a bit - we might end up with a rolling Matariki moving around the country depending on local practice - a bit like 'show day'
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Matariki is certainly 'a variable feast' - for some iwi it's the first rising of the star group before sunrise; others will use different stars...the Midwinter thing (I dont know a Dunedenite who would call it Hogmanay, and I have a lot of family in or around Otepoti) initially was a shortest day celebration, but seems to increasingly be mixing with Matariki, and the time of the festiviities extending over a fortnight or so. I see the virtue of canning QB as a public holiday, and shifting the holiday to a weekend conveniently close to the middle of June - all & sundry being able to look forward to family winter feasting & crackers, bonfires, and storytelling (or whatever we like), & check out the rising of Matariki, and enjoy the significance of the time.
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Ta! Although sadly nine out of ten people we passed said "Ooh, look at the Vikings," and the other one was invariably a European of some sort...
Ah. Little known fact about Vikings: Despite the repetitive images, Vikings never had horns on their helmets.
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Matariki celebrations seem to have more of a foothold with northern iwi and a presence in the Auckland region, for instance. No idea why.
Interesting that from what has been said here, Hogmanay in our south is celebrated at the mid-winter season - when most of our other northern-hemisphere-derived holidays are stubbornly kept at the same date, in completely the wrong season. Go the pragmatic mainlanders!
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Ur Sacha - Hogmanay is definitely celebrated when it's always been celebrated - 31st December...we still do the whole bit, piece of coal,first-footing, dark-haired man first across the threshold, a dram & feast-cakes for the visitors...but that midwinter feast thing is quite recent (within the past couple of decades) and looks like being subsumed/embodied in Matariki. As Paul suggested, it's a bit divisive & a waste to have 2 feasts so close to one another - especially when we could just shift an irrelevant public holiday and gain a long weekend to celebrate both events, winter solstice & the rising of the Little Eyes...
o thanks re that keyboard mention...the Lemon was hosting a rather defunct cockroach spread under several keys...
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Ah. Little known fact about Vikings: Despite the repetitive images, Vikings never had horns on their helmets.
Certainly unknown on the streets of New Haven, I can promise you that.
Although I did once see a fancy ceremonial helmet in a museum in, I think, Copenhagen which had a decent pair of horns. Presumably this was someone's best helmet, and not for everyday wear.
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O, if it was the same museum in Copenhagen - totally devoted to weaponry? Including shot-towers, assassins' crossbows, Meschersmidts (sp.?) and executioner's swords? wherein I once spent a truly awed afternoon - boring the piss out my publisher & my mother who both wisely took off for shopping & early dinner-yep, there is a horned Viking-era helmet therein. What Viking helmets did have were elaborate horn-ish bosses - and sometimes bird-wings (a la Asterisk) and a really useful noseguard (frequently) and cheek-guards...I mean even the berserkers tended to keep their helmets on...
If you've ever tried wearing samples of these things, it is surprising
a)how loud internal headnoises becomes-
b)how really quickly they become uncomfortable- -
nothing in Hamilton to mark it? that's just wrong
Actually in an odd confluence of topics I was in Norway over winter so I would have missed it even if there was something going on. Google says there was. I reckon a huge bonfire down by the lake would be sweet.
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fires/bonfires/wildfires like fireworks- *have to be* part of winter solstice & especially Matariki (we used to have fires on the tops of certain hills (puketapu - there's one near Palmerston still so called, and others round the south)) - "feeding the stars" was the literal translation, and a very old lady I used to know (Taua Fan) worried that nobody did it any more.
Taua arohaina, I still do, but only as a solitary, or embedding it in a family/neighbourly bonfire...
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Although I did once see a fancy ceremonial helmet in a museum in, I think, Copenhagen which had a decent pair of horns.
Presumably not a viking - might be a pre-Viking Bronze age helmet. Or Germanic.
The wings on the helmets was a Celtic thing. Gauls, such as our two cartoon friends, were Celts.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2189/did-vikings-really-wear-horns-on-their-helmets
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I was at a Halloween party in London last night where there was a Palin/McCain duo. Needless to say they were very popular and there are no doubt many photos of them floating about the internet now.
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That teaching to the test is what National is proposing here. The linking with funding is likely to follow. As well as turning kids in general off learning it is particularly inappropriate for children with different learning styles or special educational needs. Temple Grandin condemns its effect on kids with autism.
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Did anyone catch the re-run of the Temple Grandin doco "The Woman Who Thinks Like a Cow" recently? Great to see that she has carved out a life that suits her temperament and talents - with a decent education as the backbone. Vids here, including that doco.
This election still seems like a choice between a society that looks after the vulnerable and one that rewards the well-off, despite the seeming closeness of the central parties. There are arguments in favour of both those approaches, but one of them is going to make disabled children worse off than the other.
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Hear, hear. I'd leave Xmas where it is, but Matariki has the makings of a true national day/month, and without the surrounding commercial crapfest.
EXACTLY. Good idea. Just name the vege to carve out and light with candles....the humble kumara?
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Just name the vege to carve out and light with candles....the humble kumara?
Kumara might be a bit small for people within a couple of standard deviations of normal clumsiness. Taro are better on the size front, but both suffer from the problem of having fairly uniform interiors instead of being essentially self-hollowing like pumpkins are.
If we are going to try for a NZ/Pasifica veggie - instead of just saying hell with it, we eat plenty of pumpkins, pumpkin it is - maybe it will have to be in a slightly different format. Flax lanterns in the shape of stars?
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Why does it have to be a vege? I quite liked the watermelon idea.
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Flax lanterns in the shape of stars?
What a fantastic idea. My daughter would love to do that.
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