Holiday Seasons

Taking readers back in time and across the seas, this peek inside the lives of New Zealand settlers offers delightful descriptions of traditional British festivals and documents their development after being transplanted into the young colony. Though the seasons were reversed, the vegetation unfamiliar, and the land isolated, the early colonial New Zealanders were devoted to their traditions and kept them up in the face of not only their physical environment but also the wide variety of religious cultures represented by both the colonists and the native islanders. The celebrations became unique to the islands that nurtured them, mixing traditions of Presbyterians and Catholics with Baptists, Anglicans, and the Maori.