Sililo – Auckland
I’m Sāmoan in ethnicity. Obviously group meals, family meals, are important to me.
Recently we’ve had our usual get together at Christmas, and part of that is actually looking at what we did in the past and what we can be doing in the future. That was really important to us – to be able to set our goals for the coming year, and reaffirm our base – where we come from.
Because we’re based centrally everybody comes to us. The cooking usually falls on my wife unfortunately, but I try and help so I do the BBQ stuff. She basically does the rest of it.
I actually started this tradition because my children are now working age, and most of the time they’re sleeping, working or away from the family base, so we needed to organise somewhere to come together and actually touch base. We’ve now set a specific time to sit down. It’s about role modeling, and I suppose we’re telling them, ‘look, every year you should be saying to yourself where am I? Where am I going? And where have I been?’
