While I still have romantic notions about hot, dry childhood Christmases spent at sandfly-full rivers, it is the late January sun and the festivals that happen about now, that really signal summer.
The first of these is the Waitati Music Festival this Saturday. It is a festival that started with modest beginnings as a local art fest, with local bands playing to their friends and families.
Local artists and creatives made huge papier mache heads and teapots for the kids to paint and play with. It was a chance to sit around Bland Park, catch up with everyone in the village and listen to our friends crank out old blues standards and punk anthems on ancient guitars.
But, as big and fabulous as the festival is getting, with over 30 music acts, poets and artists, the local commitment to it remains.
Every year a local donates their car for the kids to paint. You can still see them being driven around the village, mobile masterpieces of art done for doing's sake.
The Waitati Militia still drums its parade through the Festival, followed by a trail of flag-waving, costumed children and their tiny dogs.
And locals donate their time to helping to keep everyone well and safe at each festival.
In its 11th year, the Waitati Music Festival is now a tradition, an institution even, built from a creative community that still works in the service of fun.
There is another big summer festival this week, the celebration of the birthday of Tahupōtiki Wiremu Rātana on the same day as the Waitati Music Festival.
This is another festival of community celebration built by the morehu, the community of the people of the Rātana faith.
The festival is a celebration of the life and work of Rātana as a spiritual, community and political leader.
Much is usually made of the politicians who visit each year at this time because it is the first major political event of the year.
And this is right, because Rātana's political legacy was important. He forged the long-standing relationship with the Labour Party that is still important for the Māori seats.
He helped to put the Treaty of Waitangi firmly on the political agenda as a matter of Māori priority that remains today.
He is also well-known for his world tour in 1924 where he and his entourage of nearly 40 morehu travelled through Europe, Asia and the Pacific.
He is most renowned for his trip to England to present a 45,000-signature petition to King George V asking the Crown to honour its treaty agreement. He was not granted an audience.
There is a Dunedin connection too. This paper reported in 1924 on his trip to the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in London.
Rātana was shocked at the state of the "Māori house" Mātaatua Wharenui on display.
Built in the 1870s by Ngāti Awa, the whare was dismantled by the Liberal government and shipped to Sydney for the 1879 International Exhibition and then sent to London.
That derelict wharenui was returned to New Zealand and held at the Otago Museum for 70 years until being returned to Ngāti Awa in 1995. It is now fully restored in Whakatane.
The Rātana world tour also had political ramifications for New Zealand's relationship with the Pacific.
Rātana's welcome in England was pretty dour but he and his people were treated with genuine respect and dignity in Japan.
This relationship would continue to grow and cause huge political difficulties for the New Zealand government as the region's war began to heat up in the 1930s.
It's a fascinating part of New Zealand's history of which TW Rātana was a central part.
While we might only see the politicians on the TV at Rātana, in fact anyone can go and participate in the full week's worth of celebrations and commemorations, as we will on Waitangi Day.
It good to recall these histories, beyond the present-day drama of politics, because our history of our communities, their actions, intentions and priorities are still relevant.
Communities work together to achieve great things and they share those things with the rest of us.
It's good to keep in mind, as we hang out in our local places over the next over weeks and eat the food our people have prepared and have fun with the creative works they have produced that they come from an honourable history of service, and fun.
Metiria Stanton Turei is a senior law lecturer at the University of Otago and a former Green Party MP and co-leader.
