Celebrating FaMEALy day 2011

Taken from Google

When I was a kid, I remember my dad calling us for dinner. Everyone must be on the dining table by dinner so we could share our day to day experience with one another. Every dinner back then was really fun was we share laughs while we enjoy our meal cooked by my mom with tender loving care. We usually enjoy it best during weekends as all of us contribute to make our dinner/lunch more memorable. Dinner won't start in our home unless all of us are seated on the table.

Also, whenever we go out shopping back then, we make sure to have dinner together outside (we choose the restaurant) and enjoy those moments. My dad usually takes us out to Shakey's to enjoy a whole pizza and a few pieces of chick n' chips to cap our day before going home. During holidays (Christmas, New Year, Fiestas), we get to eat with our other relatives as we share our stories to one another.

Now, since we have our own lives now, its very seldom we eat together (the last time was during Migmig's baptismal party at Max's). I felt a bit sad because I missed having dinner with my family. Even now that I live with my in-laws, they hardly (or probably not at all) eat all at the same time during dinner. Almost all the time, work is the main reason why we don't eat dinner all at the same time.

For generations, the family meal has been an essential human ritual. This is the time when members of the family sit around the same table, eat the same food and listen to one another. It is a sad fact that many Filipino families are now taking mealtimes for granted. All kinds of social, economic, and technological factors contributed to the decline in the frequency of family dining. With both parents working, longer commutes, and the children shuttling between school and after-school activities like sports or choir practices or attached to their screens or phones at home, family members have to eat at their own time, with no routine, with no rules.

Through the untiring efforts of Lucky Me!, the first National FaMEALy Day – Araw ng Pagkilala na Kainang Pamilya Mahalaga was launched in 2008. FaMEALy Day became a nationwide call to celebrate family dining every 4th Monday of September as supported through a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) signed between the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) and the National Committee for Filipino Families (NCFF). Last September 30, 2009, Presidential Proclamation 1895 was issued declaring the commemoration of the Filipino Family Day every 4 th Monday of September. Coincidentally, National FaMEALy Day coincides with the first day of DSWD’s National Family Week.

While Lucky Me! has embraced the advocacy as its own, through the annual celebration of National FaMEALy Day, it also envisions for the advocacy to have a “life of its own”, able to ground and spread itself more and more, even independently of the brand.

Though me and my wife won't be able to have dinner with Migmig on that day (we'll attend a wedding that day), We will make sure that as she grows up, we will have dinner altogether one way or another. Thank God someone created the Famealy Day for us to spend some more time with our loved ones over dinner.