Family Dinner

I don’t know exactly when the tradition of family dinner started but it was somewhere around the time I left high school. The tradition was started by my mum who thought it would be nice to invite some of my brother and my ‘orphaned’* friends around for a meal every couple of weeks.

*These friends weren’t really orphaned but one was visiting WA from New Zealand and another had divorced parents that worked a lot.

Over the next few years the tradition grew and grew until my mum was regularly cooking for 10-15 people twice a month, mostly for people who had perfectly stable home lives and were just good friends. Eventually, as we got older, mum did less of the cooking and the kids would work in small groups to provide a dinner once a month or so.

One of my enduring memories is of my Oma (who wasn’t Dutch but didn’t want to be called Grannie) holding court at family dinner. She would always come immaculately dressed with her best pearls on and take up position in the centre of the couch with a glass of bubbles in one hand. Over the course of the evening all my friends would take a moment to sit down and chat with her. She always remembered everything going on in everyone’s lives and would quietly listen and offer a few words of wisdom.

Eventually the tradition followed me to the UK when I went on university exchange in 1998. I hosted family dinners with a handful of people who were part of the experience in Perth plus a bunch of international students that we met when we were over there. On returning to Perth the dinners were less frequent but were still going when I moved from Perth to Melbourne in 2010. There was at least a couple of dinners that included not just my generation of kids but our kids as well.

It is hard to overstate the impact this tradition has had on my family, my friends and myself. It turned my dad from a handshaker into a hugger, it turned my friends into my parents friends and it is responsible for at least two marriages.