A Presumed History of Christmas in Papua New Guinea

(I did no additional research or fact checking for this blog article at all. The internet is super slow here, guys. I just took the knowledge in my head and put it on a blog post. It's accurate but not definitive.)  

To start, let's give a superficial account of European Christmas. There were a bunch of places in Europe that celebrated a pagan festival and they all developed their own traditions over hundreds of years on how to celebrate that paganism. Then the Catholics were like, whoa, I see you really like this paganism but maybe we can redeem it by keeping all the stuff you do but making it about Jesus. So they added that to the mix. And then there were hundreds more years of adapting and developing and deviating customs and traditions. And that's why pretty much every European culture and all the places that Europe has dropped colonies has their own Christmas traditions.

Now let's talk about PNG. The first people to come a-visiting the island was in the early 1900s. That's 100 years ago. A single century.

They came to a place that is so wild and rugged that despite the fact that the country is the same square footage as Montana, it developed 800+ different languages simply from isolation.

Ok so 100 years ago, someone shows up with an agenda. It probably wasn't to introduce Christmas. Even if Christmas did occur while they were there and they celebrated it, they would have introduced it to the people group they were hanging out with. It probably wouldn't have traveled very far past that.

So over the years, a bunch of people come and they share Christmas (maybe) with the people groups that they're with. But for the most part, really, this is something else that the crazy white people do.

Through globalization and years of exposure, Christmas gains momentum here, but it's a white man's holiday. It was probably initially celebrated much in the same way as I celebrate Boxing Day: "Why don't I have to work today? You know what, whatever, it's cool."

But unlike Boxing Day, the white man seemed to be having a lot of fun with this Holiday. And so now people dress up in Santa clothes and throw candy and betelnut (think chewing tobacco, even though it is very different) out of the back of a pickup. Some people may buy a Krismas tri  (even though the Tok Pisin word for tree is diwai. Christmas is such a white man holiday, they don't even bother translating Christmas tree.)

So sometimes people ask "What do they do (differently) for Christmas?" And the fact of the matter is, this holiday hasn't had enough time in country to develop specifically Papuan traditions. They do pretty much what we do, it's just not as beautifully. Because it's a third world country. And they don't have as much practice.