Seventy-two-year-old Clara Mahoe strolled out of her kitchen, looked around at the dozens of people making New Year's mochi in her super-sized carport yesterday and pronounced a benediction of sorts: "Family," she said. "This is what it's all about."

Eventually, the number of people joining Mahoe's annual gathering in Hawai'i Kai swelled to almost 200 family members and friends spanning four generations. They were doing what they have done for decades, coming together just before New Year's to make their own mochi, pounded sweet rice, which traditionally brings good luck to Japanese families.

And just as the grains of mochi rice start out separately and end up as one treat, so it is with the family members who start arriving from all over the Island early in the morning.

"It's the one time of the year when we get together with all the family and meet new family members and friends, too," said Mahoe, one of 16 children who first learned the mochi-pounding tradition at their mother's home in Halawa. "It's a time of great joy for us."

And hard work.

Making more than 250 pounds of mochi for every branch of the family is an all-day event involving everyone from 7 to 70. Little kids, their T-shirts covered in flour and sticky rice, run from work station to work station helping out. Young nieces and nephews stand in line waiting to take their turns pounding the rice in a 100-year-old stone bowl with wooden mallets.

Older sons and daughters help organize the line of rice pots waiting their turn to be steamed over propane stones manned by still more family workers and keep a running log of how many batches have been made — 24 by early afternoon. Still others in the family are there to simply soak it all in, reveling in a tradition that refuses to die, even when they could simply buy their mochi, like so many others, at Foodland.

Meanwhile, Clara and her husband, Bunny, preside over it all, directing some of their 14 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren to the bathroom, visiting with relatives they never see the rest of the year and constantly urging neighbors and others who just drop in on their cul-de-sac street to get something to eat from the potluck table out back.

The tradition of mochi pounding dates to ancient Japan. Short-grain sweet rice being highly prized, it was the perfect offering to the gods of luck in the coming year.

At the Mahoe gathering, each branch of the family is responsible for bringing its own rice, about 5 pounds each. The pots are lined up according to who got to the family homestead first, and the work begins to wash, steam, pound, shape and fill the mochi. While it's a community effort, it's important that family members work on their own mochi to ensure their own luck in the coming year.

Even more important, though, is that the large family still takes time to keep an old tradition alive, said Clara's son, Baba, who was watching over the rice pots and his 7-year-old daughter Abby.

"This is the family melting pot," he said. "Mom brought us up with this, and now we are passing it along to our own kids. It sure feels good to see all the generations working together."

Reach Mike Leidemann at mleidemann@honoluluadvertiser.com.