An all-inclusive holiday?

Three public holidays claim to define our identity as New Zealanders. So which one should be our national day?

- PAUL LITTLE

Our public holidays are an odd assortment. Four of them - the ones at Christmas and Easter - are Christian celebrations that were themselves adaptations of pagan festivals. One marks the birthday of an increasingly irrelevant monarch half a world away. Another celebrates the introduction of the 40-hour working week (younger readers, ask your parents). Then there is the set of provincial "anniversary days", celebrating milestones of colonisation.

Of those with a reasonable claim to being national days that tell us something about the identity of Aotearoa New Zealand, there are three. Anzac Day commemorates some say celebrates, others say mourns - a disastrous World War I event. Waitangi Day commemorates an agreement between two peoples that was broken almost as soon as it was made. And Matariki, which is only a year old, has its origins in outer space. It's all very confusing.

One thing they have in common is that, for many of us, they mean a day off work. That itself is a custom with religious origins, based as it is on the biblical day of rest taken by the Almighty as outlined in Genesis 2: 2-3.

Another common characteristic is that they include ritual elements. We do things to "mark the occasion". One hallmark of a ritual's efficacy, says Brigitte Bönisch-Brednich, director of the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, Te Herenga Waka, is flexibility.

"That is absolutely vital, for if a ritual loses its efficacy, then it becomes meaningless." And Anzac Day has demonstrated that repeatedly.

Bönisch-Brednich puts Anzac Day in the context of national days in general: "A national day is about remembering what your nation and your country is about. But it's also actively constructing what your country is about." And because countries change, what we construct and include in our national days also has to change.