Christmas is Hawaii's busiest time of year when all the major hotels and resorts are decked out in the season's best.

It's only natural for people to enjoy the Hawaiian sun during Christmas and New Years, while Santa shovels snow back home, because Hawaii has been celebrating at Christmas long before the first haoles came in 1792.

Ku is the Hawaiian god of war, and Lono is the goddess of peace, fertility and prosperity. Though Ku reigns most of the year, Lono reigns before, during, and after the Christmas season, and her reign was marked with Makahiki festivals.

The Missionaries brought the Christian religion to Hawaii in the 1820's, but Christmas as a year-end bash didn't happen until the Victorian era of the mid-1800's, just as it did Mainland. By then many Japanese and Chinese traditions were also taking hold.

Today Hawaii's year-end and New Year celebrations are a mix of Hawaiian, Mainland, Japanese, and Chinese customs, depending on your family. There's Christmas, Shogatsu, and Chinese New Year, and each with their own roots and customs, but they're all a variation of the same human themes.

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.

Over on the Mainland, where the days are short and cold, many Mainlanders traditionally spend their Christmases here in Hawaii. What better place is there to celebrate Christmas, the festival of lights and the renewal of hope, than the sunny tropical beaches of Hawaii.

"Merry Christmas" in Hawaiian is

Lono's festival was the "Makahiki," which refers to the rising of the Pleiades constellation in the sky. The tight Pleiades star cluster was called "Maka," meaning "eye," and Hawaiians regarded the Western festival as a European-American version of Makahiki.