Ngā mihi o Matariki, te tau hou Māori!

Greetings of Matariki, the Māori new year!

This month, we’ve got a bit of a Matariki theme. Matariki festivals are already underway in many parts of the country, and events will continue until around the end of July. A bunch of them are listed on the Matariki.com events page.

The public holiday falls on the 14th this year, with a celebration period of 11-17 July. The 2023 Tangaroa lunar period, when the rising of Matariki is observed, is 10-13 July.

I’m planning on posting up some more Matariki stuff later.

Also, if you’ve got an idea for next month’s banner, leave a comment below.

  • @sortofblueEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    Thanks! I’m currently copying all the significance of each star into my commonplace book so it’s good to have a bit of extra info to add :)

    • @RaoulDukeOPMEnglish
      3•1 year ago

      I’ll admit I knew very little about Matariki before it was made a public holiday, but I’ve been reading about it recently and it’s fascinating. I’m intending to put a few posts up about it as we get closer to the celebration period. I think one of them will be about the meaning of the individual stars. But I’ll probably start off with a guide about how kiwis of all ethnicities can celebrate Matariki.

      Back in the day I wrote hundreds thousands of Wikipedia articles and I kind of miss reading about something in depth, distilling the key info and then summarising it. No idea why I enjoy it, but I hope other people get something out of it.

      Edit: Looking back on my edit history, there weren’t actually thousands I wrote from scratch, more like a few hundred. I made tens of thousands of edits which is where I must be getting mixed up.