It’s my pleasure to welcome Kayla of The Bookish Owl to the blog today to celebrate Christmas with us, Filipino style! Kayla is here to tell us all about what Christmas is like at her home in the Philippines. I absolutely love learning about Christmas traditions, especially ones from cultures and countries I am not familiar with!
A typical Filipino Christmas starts around October and ends on February of the next year. Why? Well, we don’t really celebrate Halloween. The spookiest holiday is a Western tradition and while there may be a few parties, it’s not that big of a deal in my country. By October, all the Christmas decorations are up and my wish list has been sent out to my relatives.
The best thing about Christmas in the Philippines is the food. Noche Buena (Noh-cheh-Bo-we-na) is the traditional Christmas Eve dinner, a very large event within my family. There’s ham, a staple in our Christmas diet, and round fruits like oranges and grapes as it is believed that they bring good luck to you during the coming year. It’s a family feast filled with relatives asking if you have a boyfriend and awkward conversations with that cousin you haven’t seen in months. There’s also Puto Bungbong (Poo-toh-boong-boong), a Filipino street food of steamed purple rice topped with coconut, margarine and brown sugar.
However, before the Noche Buena, we dress up in our best clothes and hear Mass. I live in a small town where my parents practically know everyone and we always have to spend at least half an hour after the Mass ends just to be able to greet all the people they know. My brothers and I are forced to mano po (Ma-noh-poh) to each and everyone of them. Most of the time, I don’t mind but it grates on your nerves when they start asking you about boyfriends. Oh, the awkwardness of family. By the way, mano po is a traditional gesture made by youngsters to the elders wherein we put the backs of their right hands to our foreheads as a sign of us receiving blessing from them. It’s a sign of respect and even though it gets tiring after a while, it feels nice to uphold Filipino beliefs and customs.
Christmas in the Philippines revolves around three things; Family, Food and Faith. These 3 F’s make up our identities as Filipinos and this won’t change even with the storm surge that occurred last November. A lot of you know about Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda that recently hit the Visayas region of our country. I’m sure you have seen the devastation it wrought; people are homeless, without food to eat and the dead are piled up because the cemeteries are destroyed. Families can’t find missing loved ones as some bodies were swept out to the sea or are covered by debris. The typhoon has killed an estimated 2500 people and the earthquake that came before that killed around 200. Philippines experience about 20 typhoons in a year that do a lot of damage to our country but even with all the calamities, the tragedies and the disasters that afflict us, I know that Filipinos will continue to smile and to rebuild their lives.
For us, that is the true essence of Christmas;
finding that one speck of happiness in a dismal world.
Thank you so much for sharing your Christmas with us, Kayla! And thank you for such a sweet, heartfelt post. I think you’ve taught us a wonderful lesson: the meaning of Christmas is finding happiness in a world where things might not be going the way we hoped, or they way we needed them to go. I know I appreciate the reminder, myself.
If you would like to get to know Kayla more, visit her blog, her YouTube channel, or find her on Twitter!
So, what’s Christmas like at your home?
