Filipinos overseas remember seasons past, present trends

How was it to celebrate the holiday season in the old way, growing up in the Philippines, and how they observe it now in their adopted country? I posed this question to some friends and relatives abroad, who have been absent from the homeland for many years.

Here are some responses:

Hermie Garcia, publisher and editor of The Philippine Reporter in Toronto for the past twenty years, and former editor of the Dumaguete Times who was jailed with his wife Mila Astorga on subversion charges, reminisces:
In my childhood and teen years in Manila in the ’60s, talk about and preparations for Christmas started in October. Here in Toronto, Christmas season starts early December. Starting on December 16, there was the simbang gabi in jampacked churches at midnight but the real excitement was outside where the warm puto bumbong and salabat awaited us. Here, there’s shopping in malls, discount shopping, Boxing Day shopping, shopping online, midnight shopping, shop-till-you-drop shopping, etc. Then there was the noche buena dinner, with lots of hamon cooked tender by my father with pineapple juice, followed by the dinuguan, sinigang na hipon, kare-kare, and of course hot steamed rice and lots of kakanin like sapin-sapin, ube, malagkit and pastillas. Here, Christmas dinner is lots of takeout Chinese food, takeout Greek food, etc. and some “home-cooked” Pinoy takeout food from Pinoy stores. Back then, there were gifts from almost everyone. Here, the single-gift rule of Kris Kringle has taken over. In the past, you said to everyone, Merry Christmas! Now, here you say Happy Holidays! because of the presence of people with diverse backgrounds and religions. The world has really changed and it’s not only the climate. The times they are a’changin’, Bob Dylan was already singing back then.

Bonnie Arcache Melvin, Parisian novelist and an editor at the International Herald Tribune: I remember waking up very early on Christmas day, when we still lived in the house of my grandfather, Joseph Arcache, along the Pasig in Sta Ana. My brother and I crept down the dark staircase, scared of ghosts, then tiptoed past the three-feet high figures of the belen to the huge Christmas tree glittering in the half-light. One year it was decorated with garlands of candy that we strung together for days and days. And now, under the tree, were the presents-dozens and dozens of them, for all the aunts and uncles and cousins who lived in that beautiful doomed house in Lamayan. The house has been reduced to debris now, and halfway around the world, in Paris, I unpack white ornaments every year with my youngest daughter. Glass balls and white pigeons perched on a pine tree, and French carols on the stereo. But there is a little belen, too, and a very kitsch parol, with flashing disco lights around the Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus. Christmas is quieter here, and done in segments-friends, family (various families, reconstructed and deconstructed), then Filipino friends. I have far too many decorations at home for French tastes, and far too little for mine.

Gene Alcantara, retired British Council officer, first Filipino to run for election to the British parliament, and correspondent for The Filipino Channel, writes from London:

Having spent the last three decades in the United Kingdom, I seem to have rather hazy recollections of Christmas holidays past in the Philippines. Normally my family and I spend it away from home, except occasionally when we go back as balikbayans in December or January. In any case, it would inevitably be a White Christmas and who wants to go out in the freezing cold out there?

Last year we actually did go out into the cold and spent Christmas Day with Filipino friends new to the UK. Increasingly though it is becoming a secular Christmas, with cards saying ‘Best wishes for the Season,’ as the British increasingly get paranoid at offending other religions with their own customs and traditions. I won’t be surprised if the PC-brigade pushed to ban Christmas carols altogether.