It was the crack of dawn and a seemingly endless stream of people was pouring out of a brightly-lit old concrete church. It was very chilly—chilly enough for me to be happy, for once, that I had a thick sweater on. I was at the back of a pick-up truck, waiting for my parents to get back, and when they did, my father handed me a big, fat, warm bibingka, which smelled of sweet and salty and scorched banana leaves. I don’t remember eating that bibingka; only letting its warmth settle on my lap and then yielding, finally, to sleep.

This is my first memory of Christmas: my first Simbang Gabi. It is of colorful bright lights, smiling people, early mornings, and food--fragrant, flavorful, warm food.

Misa de gallo 

While the holiday season in the Philippines can be felt as early as September, when the first Christmas carol would sneak up on unsuspecting shoppers, it officially begins on December 16, the first day of the pre-dawn novena masses that lead up to Christmas Eve. For any Filipino, no matter where in the world one is, Christmas is not really the same without the pre-dawn masses. 

It is a tradition that goes as far back as the Spanish colonial period, the misa de gallo. Literally “mass of the rooster,” it was decided to celebrate it at three or four in the morning, instead of at night, to accommodate farmers, whose routine it was to wake up long before daybreak to tend to their chores. The Philippines is now far from the largely agricultural country it once was, but the tradition lives on.

My next pre-dawn mass after the first one came years later, upon the invitation of my childhood friends in the subdivision I grew up in. We’d all tag along with Kuya Manu, our street’s resident big brother, on the first day of Simbang Gabi and make promises to each other to attend all nine masses for the chance to make a wish in the end. Of course, that almost never happened, but year in and year out, we never failed to try. 

Year in and year out, too, we capped the pre-dawn ritual with breakfast at our subdivision’s little plaza before the morning walk back home to our waiting beds. After Simbang Gabi, all over the Philippines, you can always count on finding vendors selling puto bumbong, a purple rice pastry steamed in bamboo tubes and topped with butter, grated coconut, and brown sugar, and bibingka, a sweet thick pancake made of glutinous rice flour, topped with salted eggs and local white cheese, and baked in banana leaves. I’d never fail to bring some of either delicacy, as if they were mementos from an early morning celebration, as if without them I hadn’t really woken up and made it to the pre-dawn mass.

The Christmas lantern

My childhood friends and I would always want to walk the five blocks or so to church and back again, because it was such a joy to see the look-alike subdivision houses decked out in their Christmas best. And what is Christmas without the Philippine Christmas lantern, the parol?

Usually star-shaped, the parol—which traces its etymology from the Spanish word for lantern, farol—was inspired by the Mexican piñata and Chinese lanterns and symbolizes the Star of Bethlehem, which led the Three Kings to Jesus. It was originally used to light the paths to the church for the misa de gallo during a time when people didn’t have electricity yet.

The five-point star-shaped parol made of bamboo and papel de japon was first created by Fernando Estanislao, an artisan from San Fernando, Pampanga, who started making these lanterns in the early 1900s. To this day, Pampanga is the parol capital of the country, with the humble parol having evolved and acquired its present-day splendor. For many Filipinos, the first visual cue of the season is an array of Pampanga-made Christmas lanterns blinking colorfully along highways.

In grade six, we were asked to make a simple parol in art class, for a level-wide parol-making contest. It was like making a kite, which I had been slightly successful at as a child, only more complicated as we had to cover many sections of a three-dimensional bamboo star with the very frail Japanese paper provided with the parol kit, with the use of tubes of rice paste. My Christmas star was blue and white and very sticky; the paper was pasted loosely, so it was also wrinkly. A judge actually snickered as he looked at my creation. Obviously, it didn’t win, but despite that, we hung it up that Christmas. 

The parol is also a symbol of hope in the midst of darkness.

The Nativity Scene

Another popular Christmas decoration is the belen, or the Nativity Scene. The name belen is from the Spanish word for Bethlehem. In Spain, from which the décor--as well as everything Catholic--originated, the belen is usually a life-size decoration. We have that here too, like the giant ones that decorate office buildings and shopping malls, the one at the COD building in Cubao, Quezon City being the most popular for years and years, but many children start off recognizing the belen as little figurines residing underneath the Christmas tree, beside all the tempting, unopened presents.

In my family, we’ve only had three belens in 33 years. The first one was made of cardboard and had to be replaced when it couldn’t stand on its own. The second one, made of ceramic, was replaced when one of the three kings and some animals got broken and baby Jesus was lost.

Caroling

In the Philippines, having a house shining in Christmas décor splendor usually makes you a favorite target for a Christmas tradition that is becoming scarcer and scarcer, at least in the form I grew up with: caroling. Children with makeshift musical instruments, like tambourines made of flattened bottle caps and tin cans filled with coins, would go from house to house from December 16 onwards, singing Christmas carols in exchange for some coins. 

I’ve gone caroling a handful of times, and I remember making just enough money to buy a softdrink and chips the next day and adding two Filipino words to my vocabulary: barat, which means stingy, and patawad, which is what homeowners cry out when they don’t want to give you any money, even after your best rendition of “Give Love on Christmas Day.”

Noche Buena

In other countries, the bulk of Christmas festivities begin on December 25. Children wake up on Christmas morning, excited to find their presents underneath the Christmas tree. In the Philippines, the hard work and the partying begins on Christmas Eve, with noche buena marking the arrival of Christmas Day, and, thus, triggering an avalanche of phone calls and text messages and kisses and greetings and excited pleas from children to please allow them to open their presents. 

If you are not with family on December 24, you can feel really, really lonely. If you are alone in the evening of December 25, it can mean you’re just really, really tired from all the cooking and celebrating.

The traditional Christmas spread you can almost expect everyone to have for Noche Buena includes the following staples: lechon, queso de bola, fruit salad, leche flan, and ham. The leche flan is usually some auntie’s or grandmother’s secret recipe; the fruit salad is often the family’s unique version (ours has ground peanuts, for instance). The lechon and ham are understood to be part of many breakfasts as ingredients for a variety of concoctions, while nobody really eats the queso de bola—at least not during Noche Buena.

In the last few years, my family and I have realized we’re just cooking to fill the refrigerator with leftovers. The youngest in the family is 26 and we’re all past the age when we could stuff our faces with as much food as we want. Still, we keep cooking, because it’s tradition.

Last year, we decided to change it up a little and cook only what we could eat at noche buena, skipping the labor-intensive recipes, like the chicken macaroni salad and lasagna. We were done cooking in an hour, and ready to eat way before midnight—unlike the many Christmas Eves in the past when we would have a dish or two… or three still waiting to be cooked in the kitchen.

It was not the same. Apparently, part of our Christmas tradition is stressing out in the kitchen, exchanging catch up stories, bickering over the overcooked leche flan, and snapping at brothers stealing cheese or shredded chicken or whatever ingredient waiting to be added to a dish.

Flash forward to another Christmas memory, many years later. My cousin and I were in her car, looking for a convenience store that would honor a gift certificate for a gallon of ice cream on Christmas Eve. As we were parking at a gas station, we saw a brightly decorated tricycle leave. The driver had his wife inside the cab and a toddler straddling the motorcycle in front of him. Two children were on his back seat, and they were clutching a pack of hot dogs, a bottle of soda, and a loaf of bread. They were all smiling happily, as if they had run off with the world’s biggest treasure. For that moment, the tricycle was home to the family and their noche buena. 

Just as well, because in the Philippines, the land of fiestas with all its attendant trappings, it is really the people who make up the feast. -end-