Celebrating birthdays and wedding anniversary in New Zealand history
In past years, it was believed by Maori that birthdays are time of bad spirits and danger, so people were making good wishes and their friends were surrounding them to get rid of bad spirits. Nevertheless, European settlers introduced the tradition of celebrating birthdays to the New Zealand.
Before 1850’s, people couldn’t mark their birthdays, because they didn’t know their birth date. However, from 1913 births were officially registered for Maori people. In the late 1800’s, childhood was seen as an important period of life, so children’s birthdays began to be celebrated.
Like other traditional birthday rituals in the world, the birthday person was wished well and good luck by other people, or given them presents in New Zealand too. From 20th century, most Pakeha households made parties for children’s birthdays with games and birthday cakes. Birthday cakes with lighted candles- one for each year of person’s life- were blew out by birthday person by making a wish and others around the birthday person sing ‘Hari huritau a koe’ in Maori or ‘happy birthday to you’. Also from 20th century, 21st birthdays were celebrated with big events and people were given a fancy key which represents ‘getting the key to the house’ , because 21 was the age when a person became legally independent of their parents.
Like celebrating birthday, celebrating wedding anniversary with silver (25th),golden (50th) and diamond (60th) was brought to New Zealand by European settlers, too. In 1800’s, this kind of events were very infrequent, because life expectancy was low in those times. But at the mid 19th century, celebrating other wedding anniversaries -giving gift of different materials-became popular. Couples who are in their first anniversary were given paper and couples who are in their 10st were given tin as a gift. As in the many other cultures, silver, gold and diamond anniversaries are still celebrated. Sometimes people reenact their wedding by wearing their old wedding clothes.
