Leaving Parties, An Idiots guide.
2024 saw its highest levels of departures from New Zealand ever, 127,800 to be exact. Some for good, some for a while, most to Australia. We’re in no danger of completely emptying out any time soon though. 158,400 arrived in the country, although this number is down 32% from 2023. But I’m getting in the weeds with this preamble.
The point is, there’s a lot of leaving parties presumably happening every day In New Zealand. But when is it appropriate to hold a get together to say farewell? I was once confronted with this question when a pair of friends had a farewell party when they went for a six week OE to Europe to take photos in front of art they didn’t care about, get spat on by French people, and get led out to the forest to take turns blasting machine guns with a sketchy Russian gentleman. You might be able to guess the one activity the male in the party organised to make a point that he did have some agency in his life.
At the time of the party it seemed to me that I had arrived to toast someone else to go off and have an infinitely better time than I’d be having over a set period of time where I’d have only seen them twice tops anyway. I let them know at the time and was met with an icey reception. I have no idea why.
This leads us to our first metric.
Friendship
Depending on your familiarity with someone that will dictate whether you should be celebrating with them to begin with. If you’ve been a passing acquaintance with someone in your friend group for over five years you might attend under the polite proviso you had any intention of ever being interested in their lives. Family members are a must attend regardless of any other metric because your mum will be upset if you don’t show up, and besides, you only see them 3 times a year otherwise.
Distance Traveled
Doing a farewell party for anyone who’s not leaving the South Pacific and Oceania is garish. You don’t get a farewell party for going to the Gold Coast to pick up your yearly sunburn, I’m sorry. Having homemade hooch in Bali will also not earn you any party privileges because you’ll be having plenty of that we’re you’re going. I’ve calculated that Party earning distance only begins after travelling 9356km from New Zealand. Anything under that may as well be throwing a party for going to the dairy down the road.
Time Absent
This is perhaps the most key metric. Polling the office we discovered a wide spread of responses for “how long does someone need to be leaving for to necessitate a leaving party?”
Interestingly the responses came in a linear pattern based on payscale. Our freelance writer said six weeks while at the upper end of the curve our Managing Director said a year before he’s wasting his time on that fluff. I’m not about to outscope this piece by complicating it with class struggles so we averaged out the numbers to a surprisingly high five months.
The Golden Rule
At the end of the day, the primary rule of thumb is to find any excuse to socialise and have a good time, no matter what some dumb back page of a magazine says.