"Mele Kalikimaka" -- You don't have to pronounce it to celebrate

Pity poor Hawaii. Always on the tail end of national election counts. Seldom remembered at Christmas.

But Christmas began in Hawaii in 1786. Anchored in Waimea Bay, British Captain George Dixon of the Queen Charlotte had a pig brought from Kauai island, and regaled his officers and crew with a Christmas dinner -- with pie and the daily ration of grog mixed with coconut milk. History does not record whether the men made little paper umbrellas for their cocktails.[1]

The first haoles [outsiders] settled in Hawaii came in 1792, missionaries introduced Christmas to the natives in the 1820s, and the holiday became an established event in the mid 1800s. But the roots of Christmas run deep in native culture. Lono, the Hawaiian goddess of peace, fertility and prosperity, reigns the Pacific sky in a period of the year that includes the Western Christmas season. The rest of the year belongs to Ku, god of war.

"Hawaii Travel" at Royalelephant.com said that nowadays "gifts, honor, and respect are given, and the extended family gathers together for a traditional meal. Shrines and creches are displayed, and ceremonies and prayers are recited as the past year is weighed in hopeful anticipation of the year to come. Same things in different ways. Christmas in Hawaii is a multi-cultural event marked by Santa's arrival in an outrigger at Waikiki Beach, Christmas lights at Honolulu Hale, shopping sprees, and shiploads of freshly cut Christmas trees from Mainland." [2]

"Merry Christmas" in Hawaiian is "Mele Kalikimaka." This is because the Hawaiian alphabet has only these letters: A, E, I, O, U (each vowel having a long and short pronunciation), H, K, L, M, N, P, W. The symbol ' is the glottal stop, or a catch in the throat (like a kid's pronuniciation of "nuttin'" for "nothing"). [1] These letters do double duty in foreign loan words -- like the second "k" substituting for the first "s" in "Christmas."

By a curious conincidence, "maka" (at the end of "Kalikimaka") means "eye" in the Hawaiian language. The festival of the Peace Goddess Lono was called "Makahiki," when the Peleiades Constellation rose into the sky. The tight star cluster resembled a eye to the native observers.

No wonder that Hawaaians thought that the European "Kalikimaka" was a foreign variation of their own "Makahiki" for the benevolent Lona. [3]

Now you can join Bette Midler in a chorus of "Mele Kalikimaka."

• SOURCES:

[1] "How Christmas Came to Hawaii," as Presented by Hoku Paoa Stevenson at the Summer Palace, by John Fischer, About.com

[2] "Hawaii Travel" http://www.royalelephant.com/hawaii/events/kalikimaka.htm

[3] "Hawaiian Travel."

 
Image source: "M45 - The Pleiades" http://flickr.com/photos/djmccrady/356172129/ byDJMcCrady, under Creative Commons license Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic. This permission in no way implies that DJMcCrady endorses denseatoms or the use of the work.