[1] The day is for parents and communities to acknowledge and celebrate childhood by hosting special programs during church services which include scriptural recitations, biblical story reenactments, and creative dance performances.
Children receive gifts (often new clothing and/or school supplies) on White Sunday and are allowed privileges normally reserved for elders, such as being the first to be served food at family meal time.
Some believe White Sunday to be a Christian adaptation of an indigenous pre-contact celebration of certain planting and harvesting seasons.
Others assert that the holiday coincides with a family celebration that became widespread in the 1920s in commemoration of Samoans who succumbed to the influenza epidemic of 1919; this epidemic, introduced through the ambivalence of the New Zealand colonial administration, took the lives of a fifth to a quarter of the Samoan population, many of them children.
A special service is held on Saturday evening to prepare everyone - minister, children, parents and families - for White Sunday.