Flag: Christmas Island

It points to Christmas Island, the Australian territory. The words around it tell you whether the sender means a holiday there, a job (the island's phosphate mine and national park employ many of its workers), a home town, or a post about its wildlife. Like any flag emoji it says where, not who: it does not tell you anyone's nationality, and most islanders are Australian citizens anyway.

One misreading is worth knowing. Because the emoji's name contains the word Christmas, searching an emoji keyboard for "Christmas" can bring up this flag next to 🎄 and 🎅. If a festive message arrives with a blue-and-green flag in it and no mention of any island, the sender almost certainly tapped the wrong result and meant a Christmas greeting. Reply to the greeting, not the geography.

Where is Christmas Island, and what is it known for?

A rainforest-covered island far closer to Indonesia than to Australia. It sits about 350 km south of Java but roughly 1,500 km from the nearest point of the Australian mainland. It got its name because an English East India Company captain sighted it on Christmas Day 1643; the holiday connection stops there. Nobody lived on it until phosphate was found in the 1880s, and the mine brought in workers from China and Malaya. Today a population of a couple of thousand is mostly of Chinese and Malay descent, with English, Malay and Chinese spoken side by side, and Chinese New Year, Hari Raya and Christmas all celebrated on the island.

The island's celebrity is its red crabs. Every year at the start of the wet season, usually between October and December, tens of millions of land crabs leave the forest and march to the sea to spawn. Roads close, rangers build crab bridges and underpasses, and the spectacle is filmed by nature documentaries and visitors alike. Much of the island is national park, and it also has seabird colonies, including the golden bird on the flag. When 🇨🇽 appears beside 🦀, this migration is what the sender means.

What is on the flag?

Sea, land, stars, a golden bird and a gold map disc. The flag is split diagonally: blue for the Indian Ocean, green for the island's forest. The blue half carries the white stars of the Southern Cross, the constellation on Australia's own flag. The green half shows a golden bosun bird, a yellow-tinted form of the white-tailed tropicbird found only on Christmas Island, in flight. In the centre, a gold disc holds a green outline of the island; the gold stands for the phosphate mining that built the settlement.