Merry Christmas in Māori: Meri Kirihimete

To say merry Christmas in Māori, say Meri Kirihimete! ‘Merry Christmas!’ Te Aka Māori Dictionary lists it as a loan from the English, and it is the greeting Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori, the Māori Language Commission, prints on its Christmas cards: Meri Kirihimete ki a koutou ko te whānau! ‘Merry Christmas to you and your whānau!’ For the new year, say Ngā mihi o te tau hou! ‘Happy new year!’ Below are both greetings word by word, where the sources differ, ready-to-copy card messages, the words for Santa, presents, the feast and the pōhutukawa, the carols sung in te reo, and the Christmas Day of 1814 when the first Christian service in New Zealand was translated into Māori.

Updated 25 October 2026 · 11 min read

Tap 🔊 to hear an example. Māori examples play Papa Reo, the te reo Māori voice made by Te Hiku Media from recordings of native speakers.

How to say merry Christmas in Māori

There is one everyday greeting and a few ways to address it. Ki a means to before a pronoun or a name, so the end changes with how many people you are greeting:

Koe is you for one person, kōrua for two and koutou for three or more, the split the Māori pronouns guide explains. In ki a koutou ko te whānau, ko joins the family to you all, so the whole household is greeted in one breath.

Meri Kirihimete word by word

Kirihimete is Christmas, borrowed and reshaped by the sound rules that the guide to English words in Māori takes apart: vowels split the consonant clusters and the s becomes h. It is old: Te Aka’s examples come from Māori-language newspapers, and one from 1909 uses it as a verb, to spend Christmas, in a message asking a visitor me Kirihimete ia ki Waimamaku ‘that he should spend Christmas at Waimamaku’.

Meri is the surprise. On its own, Te Aka’s Meri is the name Mary, and there is no separate Māori word for merry. Only the whole phrase is listed: Meri Kirihimete, Merry Christmas, borrowed as one unit, with the variant spelling Mere Kirihimete as its synonym. Te Aka’s example for it, from a newspaper of 1898, sends “Meri Kirihimete me te Hape Nū Ia” to all the tribes and hapū, as the Pākehā say: Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, sounded out in Māori spelling.

Happy new year in Māori

Here the usual greeting is Māori through and through. Ngā mihi is greetings, acknowledgements; tau is year and hou is new. So ngā mihi o te tau hou is the greetings of the new year, and Te Aka glosses it happy new year. Its example is a ready-made card:

Te Tau Hou on its own is the New Year. The nineteenth-century newspapers also borrowed the English, and Te Aka keeps two spellings of the loan, Nū Ia and Niu Ia. One example, from 1923, puts the season together: He wā pai te Kirihimete me te Nū Ia ‘Christmas and the New Year are good times’ to dress your child in nice clothes.

This is the new year of 1 January. Many iwi mark a Māori New Year in midwinter, when the star cluster Matariki rises; its greeting and its stars are in Matariki words and phrases.

Where the accounts differ

None of these sources calls another wrong. Hari tau hou turns up online as a word-for-word happy new year, and hari is Te Aka’s joy, to be happy, but no dictionary or official source reached for this page prints the phrase, so it is not offered here; ngā mihi o te tau hou is the attested greeting.

Writing a Christmas card in Māori

A card needs three things: the greeting, who it is for, and who it is from. Nā before a name means by or from, the same word that signs a letter in Māori greetings and sign-offs. For warmth, Te Aka gives aroha nui, much love, noting that it is “often used in signing off letters to friends”; it also lists the one-word spelling arohanui, but adds that it is more correctly written as two words.

Ready-to-copy Christmas card messages

Each line below is either quoted from Te Aka or Te Taura Whiri, or built from their pieces with the pronouns above. Swap the names for your own.

To a family:
Meri Kirihimete ki a koutou ko te whānau!
Ngā mihi o te tau hou.
Aroha nui, nā Mere

To one friend:
Meri Kirihimete ki a koe!
Aroha nui, nā Hone

To a couple, from two of you:
Meri Kirihimete ki a kōrua!
Nā Mere rāua ko Hone

A new-year message to a friend and their family, Te Aka’s own sentence:
Ngā mihi o te tau hou ki a koutou ko tō whānau, e hoa.

For a work email at the end of the year, Massey’s sign-offs can stand in place of season’s greetings:
Ngā mihi o te Kirihimete
Ngā mihi o te tau hou
Nā Mere

Rāua ko joins two names, Mere and Hone. To greet a whole group warmly first, you can open with E te whānau, tēnā koutou, family, greetings to you all. The birthday version of all this, with Rā whānau, is in Happy birthday in Māori.

Christmas words in Māori

Most Christmas vocabulary is borrowed, and Te Aka marks those words as loans. The exceptions are the oldest and most local ones: the feast, the gift and the tree that flowers red in December.

Two gaps are worth knowing. Te Aka has no entry for Christmas Eve, and none for the decorated fir tree, only for the native trees that flower at Christmas. For perehana against koha, the difference is explained under birthday presents; at Christmas, Te Taura Whiri simply calls the presents taonga, treasures.

Phrases for Christmas Day

Te Taura Whiri’s Te Reo o te Raumati cards for Christmas Day are written for a family morning. Six of them:

Hura is Te Aka’s to remove a covering, uncover, unveil, the same word as in a headstone unveiling, and pakō is to make a loud sudden noise: a cracker is pulled for its bang.

The pōhutukawa: New Zealand’s Christmas tree

Te Aka defines the pōhutukawa as the New Zealand Christmas tree, a coastal tree that bears large red flowers about Christmas time, with leaves velvety-white underneath. NZ History traces the name in English: the missionary Henry Williams described holding a service under a “wide spreading pohutukawa” in 1833, and the first known published reference to it as a Christmas tree came in 1857, when its scarlet flowers decorated the tables at a feast given by the Ngāpuhi leader Eruera Patuone. Settlers soon called it the “Settlers Christmas tree” and “Antipodean holly”.

The tree matters in Māori tradition long before Christmas. NZ History tells of the crimson flowers as the blood of Tāwhaki, who fell to earth trying to reach the heavens, and of the ancient pōhutukawa at Cape Rēinga, from whose roots the spirits of the dead descend on their way to Hawaiki. Te Aka also lists rautini, the Chatham Island Christmas tree, a shrub crowned with golden-yellow daisies in summer. More native trees are in Māori nature words.

Christmas in summer

In Aotearoa, Christmas falls in raumati ‘summer’, which runs from December to February; the four seasons in Māori guide sets out the months. Te Ara, the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, quotes a settler, Jemima Martin of Tāmaki, writing home in 1852 that “Xmas in the middle of summer & winter in August gives one an uncomfortable sensation of being turned upside down”.

Te Ara describes how the day adapted. Ferns, flax and pōhutukawa replaced holly and mistletoe; people ate and relaxed outdoors; summer food crept onto the menu; and local delicacies such as eel were served at Māori Christmas hākari ‘feasts’. The Catholic midnight Mass on Christmas Eve was well attended from settler days. Because Christmas and the New Year fall together in midsummer, many families travel to visit relatives, a habit Te Ara links to the Mondayising of the two holidays in 1921 and to businesses closing between them.

The first Christmas service: Oihi, 1814

Te Aka’s own example for Kirihimete is a sentence from a Māori newspaper of 1919: Nō te Kirihimete o te tau 1814, ka kauwhau ia i tana kauwhau tuatahi ki a Ngā Puhi i Oihi ‘At Christmas in 1814 he preached his first sermon to Ngā Puhi at Oihi’. The preacher is Samuel Marsden, whom Te Aka lists in Māori as Te Mātene, an early missionary to Aotearoa, first preaching on Christmas Day 1814.

NZ History gives the events. Marsden arrived at Rangihoua in the Bay of Islands, the home of the Ngāpuhi leader Ruatara, on 22 December 1814, with the lay missionaries of the Church Missionary Society. On Christmas Day, at Hohi (Oihi) beach, he preached in English to a largely Māori gathering on the significance of the birth of Jesus, and Ruatara, whom he had first met in Sydney in 1809, translated. It marked the start of the first Christian mission in New Zealand. Ruatara died in early March 1815.

NZ History adds an earlier Christmas. On Christmas Day 1769 the French explorer Jean François Marie de Surville was in Doubtless Bay in the Far North, with a Dominican priest, Father Paul-Antoine de Villefeix, on board the St Jean Baptiste. No record of the day survives, but NZ History judges it very likely that Mass was said on board.

Christmas carols in te reo Māori

Te Harinui

The best-known New Zealand carol is about that 1814 service. Te Harinui was written by Willow Macky in 1957, according to NZ Folk Song, and SOUNZ, the Centre for New Zealand Music, says it would be unusual to have attended a New Zealand school’s end-of-year assembly without singing it. Its words are in English apart from the refrain, which repeats the Māori title and glosses it as “glad tidings of great joy”, the words of the angel in Luke’s Gospel that NZ Folk Song says Marsden preached on.

Harinui is not a Te Aka headword, but its parts are: hari, joy, happiness, and nui, big, great. Macky died in 2006, so the words are still in copyright and are not printed here; SOUNZ sells the scores, and NZ Folk Song has the whole carol.

Silent Night in Māori

Silent Night has more than one Māori version. NZ Folk Song counts at least eight and knows no translator or date for any of them, which is why none is printed here. The two most often sung today, it says, begin Mārie te pō, tapu te pō, “peaceful night, holy night”, and Pō mārie, pō aroha, “peaceful night, night of love”. Mārie is Te Aka’s peaceful, calm. As a pair, though, Te Aka gives pō mārie as good night, “a modern usage not used by some native speakers”: in the carol it is the night itself that is peaceful.

The carol has wartime history too. NZ Folk Song has a 1942 recording of Māori Battalion patients at No. 2 New Zealand General Hospital in North Africa singing it, with Nurse Wiki Katene of Porirua (Ngāti Toa) as soloist, and quotes Richard Spence’s biography of the chaplain Wi Huata: at Orsogna in Italy, at midnight on Christmas Eve 1943, “the Maori struck up ‘Silent Night’ in Maori. And the Germans replied in their language.” More songs everyone in New Zealand knows are in Māori songs.

Going further

The Christmas greeting in many other languages, with how often each is said, is compared in Merry Christmas and happy new year in other languages. For the everyday Māori you would use around the table, the free te reo Māori course teaches the pronouns, whānau, tau, kai and the greetings one lesson a day, with every example spoken in a native te reo voice.

Sources

1. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: Kirihimete
2. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: Meri Kirihimete
3. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: Mere Kirihimete
4. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: Meri (Mary)
5. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: kāri Kirihimete
6. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: Te Tau Hou
7. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: ngā mihi o te tau hou
8. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: Nū Ia
9. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: Niu Ia
10. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: mihi
11. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: hou
12. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: hari (to be happy; joy)
13. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: Hana Kōkō
14. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: pōhutukawa
15. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: hutukawa
16. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: kaihika
17. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: rautini
18. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: taonga
19. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: perehana
20. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: koha
21. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: hākari
22. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: tiripapā
23. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: pihikete
24. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: kāroti
25. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: hararei
26. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: hura (to uncover)
27. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: pakō
28. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: waimarie
29. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: raumati
30. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: aroha nui
31. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: arohanui
32. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: nā
33. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: kia pai te rā
34. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: pō mārie
35. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: mārie
36. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: Mātene, Te (Samuel Marsden)
37. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: Ruatara
38. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: Peterehema
39. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: anahera
40. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: Ihu
41. Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori: Te Rā Kirihimete – Christmas Day (Te Reo o te Raumati phrase tiles)
42. Massey University: Using te reo Māori in letters and emails
43. NZ History (Manatū Taonga): First Christian mission established
44. NZ History: Samuel Marsden’s first sermon (with Christmas Day 1769)
45. NZ History: Pōhutukawa trees
46. Nancy Swarbrick, Public holidays – Easter, Christmas and New Year, Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand
47. NZ Folk Song: Te Harinui (Willow Macky, 1957)
48. NZ Folk Song: Pō Mārie / Mārie te Pō, Silent Night in Māori
49. SOUNZ, Centre for New Zealand Music: Willow Macky
50. SOUNZ: Te Harinui, for SATB choir