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Meri Kirihimete from the Kiwi Whānau

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This New Zealand-themed Christmas card has been quietly outselling the rest of my Christmas collection this week, and once you start picking it apart, it's easy to see why — it's less a single joke than a whole checklist of things that make a New Zealand Christmas feel like a New Zealand Christmas.

A family of kiwi birds share a pavlova topped with huhu grubs and fruit beneath a flowering pohutukawa tree, with a weta on the woven flax mat
Kiwi Whānau Christmas Pavlova Picnic

Start with the tree. That's a pōhutukawa in full bloom overhead — New Zealand's unofficial Christmas tree, flowering crimson right on cue every December whether or not anyone planted it for the occasion. No New Zealand Christmas scene is complete without one.

Then there's the pavlova itself, piled with kiwifruit and strawberries, sitting in the middle of the picnic the way it sits in the middle of every Kiwi Christmas table. And tucked in among the fruit — the one detail every New Zealander clocks a half-second after everyone else — a scattering of huhu grubs. It reads as a garnish, but it's also the honest truth: huhu grubs are a real kiwi bird delicacy, so the joke is that this family has brought their own actual food along to a human dessert and plated it like it belongs there.

The two chicks give it the "whānau" in the title — this isn't just a kiwi having Christmas, it's a family having Christmas, which is really what the day is about regardless of species. And over on the edge of the woven flax whāriki, there's a weta keeping watch — about as New Zealand a cameo as an insect can make.

Put together, it's less a single punchline than a small, affectionate catalogue of the things that make the day recognizable from the other side of the world: the tree, the pav, the grubs, the mat, the bug on the mat. It's available as a greeting card, along with the usual range of other formats, for anyone who wants to send a Christmas card that's unmistakably from New Zealand.

It's part of the full Christmas collection on Redbubble. You can find all my work at my Redbubble shop, KornKob Art — or search Redbubble for kornkobart (one word).

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