Aloha Friday

In Hawai’i, Aloha Friday means slow down: one aloha shirt, one easier day, and no rush at anything before the weekend. On a blog, it meant one easy question and a comment thread.

Aloha Friday was one of the earliest categories on this blog and one of the last to stop. The format was minimal by design — a single question, posted on a Friday, with no theme and no requirement to write anything at all. The post was three lines. The comments ran to fifty.

Where the phrase comes from

Aloha Friday began in Honolulu in the late 1960s as a campaign to get local garment manufacturers’ shirts into offices, and it worked so completely that it stopped being a campaign and became simply how Friday works in the islands. It travelled: what the rest of the world calls casual Friday is, by a fairly direct line of descent, the same idea with the aloha taken out of it.

The phrase carries more than dress code, though. Aloha does not translate cleanly as hello, goodbye or love, although it is used for all three — the Hawaiian dictionaries at Wehewehe give the range properly, and the state’s own statutes contain an unusual provision, the Aloha Spirit law, describing it as a working principle of conduct rather than a greeting. It is one of the few places where a legislature has attempted to define a mood.

How the meme worked

The blog version was as simple as the tradition:

• One question, posted Friday.
• Anything at all — what are you doing this weekend, what is the best thing you ate this week, what would you take to a desert island.
• Answer in the comments. No post of your own required.
• That’s it. Go and have a weekend.

The absence of a posting requirement is what made it different from almost everything else in the week. Sunday Stealing wanted twenty answers on your own blog. The Muffed Target wanted a photograph and a story. Aloha Friday wanted a sentence in a comment box, which meant the people who never posted anywhere still turned up, and the thread was consistently the friendliest of the week.

Friday on this blog

Friday also carried the other end of the island week. The monthly comment count tended to be settled over a weekend. Weekend Funnies went up. And a great deal of the blog’s Hawaiian vocabulary arrived through Friday posts — mahalo, pau for finished, hau’oli for happy, and the sign-off used at the bottom of every post here for three straight years, a hui hou: until we meet again.

Which is a rather good thing to be saying every Friday, if you think about it, and an even better one to be saying at the end of a blog.

Writing about a place you actually live in

There is a particular problem with blogging from somewhere that other people think of as a holiday, and Aloha Friday is where it showed up most often.

The readership here was largely on the mainland and in Europe, and a good proportion of it arrived with an image of Hawai’i assembled from travel advertising: beach, cocktail, sunset, repeat. Meanwhile the blog was being written by somebody with a job, a commute on the bus, a yard that needed doing and a football team that kept losing. Every so often those two things collided in a comment thread — somebody would say something wistful about paradise underneath a post about the traffic on the H-1.

The blog’s response to that was never to correct anybody, which would have been tedious, and never to play up to it either. It just kept posting the ordinary things: the bus, the flowers in the yard, the parade going past, the rain. Over three years that accumulates into something a travel site cannot produce, which is a portrait of a place as a place rather than as a destination. The Merrie Monarch posts did the same job from the cultural end — an annual explanation, aimed at people who genuinely did not know, of why one week of hula in Hilo mattered more than anything else happening that month.

Aloha Friday, being a question rather than a statement, was the version of this that worked best. Ask a straightforward question on a Friday and thirty people from four continents answer it, and the differences between their weeks turn up on their own without anybody having to point at them.

Hey, it’s only my opinion.
A Hui Hou