Travel Snapshot: Easter in the Philippines

Easter week, or Semana Santa, is one of the most important holidays in the Philippines.
Businesses shut down, workers return home for a visit, and many take part in processions, like this one,
photographed in Cebu City by D.C. Pelka. 

Winter Holiday Mash Up

By Kelly Raftery

This week’s topic is Festivals, but I just cannot seem to get my head around writing about Navruz, Kyrgyzstan’s springtime festival in the same week that saw the tragedy in Newtown.  In my husband’s country, people shivered with no heat or electricity as temperatures dipped to -4 degrees Fahrenheit.  I am sure that springtime seems very far away for most Kyrgyz right now and it just did not seem appropriate to write a light piece about festivals given all that has happened this past week.     

A leaping stag honors my husband's Kyrgyz tribe.

I wanted to tell you a bit about my family’s blended holiday traditions.  Let me start by saying that I am the daughter of a marriage of two different faiths.  My husband was brought up in the Soviet Union (no religion allowed, that would be “opiate of the masses”) and his country today has gone back to its pre-Soviet Islamic roots, but with healthy doses of Kyrgyz animism and realism thrown in.  So, we have our choice of winter holidays to observe.  I grew up with a Santa and Rudolph Christmas (sorry, there was no Christ present) and my husband had a tradition of Father Frost and New Year’s Eve family celebrations.

When we were first married, I relinquished Christmas and converted to New Year’s.  To be quite honest, I have never been a huge fan of Christmas.  I find baking cookies stressful and the emphasis in America on the commercial aspect of the holiday somewhat off-putting. So, as a young married couple, we  would put up the New Year tree a couple of days before Christmas, buy each other small gifts at post-Christmas sales (the best part about not celebrating until a week later!) and just spend a very quiet day at home.  

A clock ornament shows five minutes to midnight on New Year's Eve.

It was after my son was born that we began to celebrate Christmas again, accepting the futility of resisting the 

Cult of Santa Claus.  (Which, now that I think about it,  is probably precisely the same way I ended up celebrating Christmas as a child, as it was not my mother’s tradition.)  In our home, the Jolly Old Elf comes on Christmas Eve for our son, but Daddy’s holiday is New Year’s.  Christmas is the child’s holiday exclusively, as Santa only brings toys for little ones. 

Our tree, when decorated is the same mish mash of holidays--with traditional American ornaments snuggling up against a yurt here, or a camel there.  The Snow Maiden and Father Frost compete with Santa Claus and Rudolph for room in the branches.  A small clock shows hands pointed at five minutes until midnight next to a hearth with stockings hung on Christmas Eve.  The tree is topped not with the traditional star, but with a leaping stag, in honor of my husband’s Kyrgyz tribe.  It is not one set of traditions, but rather a tapestry of different traditions that we have woven over time.  I delight in my son pulling out ornament after ornament, exclaiming, “I love this one!  Look how beautiful!”      

Father Frost and the Snow Maiden hang alongside Santa Claus.

One tradition that I hold dear is our custom of giving.  Not gifts to each other (for in our home, the adults do not receive gifts) but to those less fortunate than ourselves.  My husband and I agree that while we may not have all that we want, we certainly have all that we need and we are all too aware that many worldwide do not have the basic necessities of life.  Every year, my son and I find a wish tree or board and make sure that another child’s desire is fulfilled.  At school, my son carefully chose a small paper snowman with the words, “Winter Coat” and “Snow Boots” written on it.  Picking a name, shopping and wrapping for someone we don’t even know is a key part of our holiday celebration, as much as calling all of my husband’s brothers and sisters and friends is on New Year’s Eve. 

A felt yurt nestles in the branches of the tree.

It is not a traditional winter celebration in any culture, but it is ours and for us, it works. So, mix together Christmas cookies, latkes and manty and what do you get?  My family’s winter holiday in all its glory. 

Wishing each of you  a wonderful holiday season and all the best in the New Year!

Diwali, American Style

Credit: Ramesh NG

By Supriya Savkoor 

In a dozen countries from Mauritius to Trinidad and Tobago, Suriname to Fiji, and Myanmar to Guyana, the Indian holiday of Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, is an official national holiday. In the United States, where I grew up and still live, Diwali has grown from a quiet home affair to a festival celebrated in schools, offices, and party halls in nearly every major metropolis from coast to coast.

While the date of the festival of lights varies each year, it always falls between mid-October to mid-November. When my kids’ attended Montessori school a few years ago, our hearts were full when their American teachers greeted us at the door in saris for this most celebrated Hindu festival, salvar kameezes for the Muslim holiday of Ramadan, and in full crazy costume for Halloween—all within the same week! (Then celebrated Chinese New Year a month after the Gregorian one a few months later.)

Credit: Ethan Lofton

This year, we celebrate Thanksgiving only one week after Diwali. And since we'll be hosting Thanksgiving at our place this year, it seems only fitting that we celebrate Diwali while the whole extended clan is gathered, especially since all of the kids have been raised outside India. Thursday night, we start with our usual fare, a traditional Thanksgiving feast with turkey and all the trimmings, alongside a traditional, mostly vegetarian (but not entirely) Indian feast of mutton curry, paneer masala (spicy Indian cheese curry…or something to that effect), a lentil curry (dal) with spinach, and a cauliflower stirfry. I love that everyone gets to choose their feast of choice that night—or combine options, for those so daring. Imagine a dollop of cranberry sauce on the same plate as a curry dish (yum), a syrupy gulab jamun lolling against a slice of pumpkin pie. Only in America, right?

The following night is the real treat. None of the dozen or so kids who’ll be at our place have ever celebrated Diwali in India, and so we're excited to treat them to our own variation of the centuries-old tradition. We’ll have all the ingredients: traditional attire, sparklers, an exchange of gifts, cocktails (no, seriously), poker. And for the kids, craft time and age-appropriate games. I can’t wait.

Credit: Arne Hückelheim

It’s all tradition but then some. The cocktail party, for example, features a cheese fondue, meatballs braised in mint and honey, and a couple Italian appetizers. The gifts feature characters from Winnie the Pooh and Batman. The sparklers may include (if I get to vote) lanterns we let go of, only to watch float up into the sky (instead of putting diyas, like the one pictured at left, afloat in the river). Later, or maybe earlier, depending on how tired we all are, a show put on by the kids. A modern retelling of the Ramayana, for Diwali commemorates Lord Ram’s return to his kingdom after 13 long years in exile and after, yes, more than a few adventures.

Again, I can’t wait.

Happy Thanksgiving and Happy Diwali to you and yours!

Credit: ISAL Indian Students Association Leuven (Belgium)

Two (Western) Holidays in One

By Beth Green

It’s holiday season again.

My relatives and friends in the U.S. have already started groaning about the incessant drone of shopping-mall carols, the thought of making lists and checking them twice, and the old rant that Christmas comes earlier every year. It makes a nice change, Facebook-reading-wise, from all the election posts, but mostly it draws my attention to the way the end-of-year holidays are celebrated differently all over the world, and the way facets of American culture have been adopted in Asia.

A Christmas tree vies for attention with one of the old towers of Xi'an

This year, in the Philippines, I’m looking forward to seeing how this overwhelmingly Christian country celebrates Jesus’ birth. The Christ figure is revered here, and Christmas carols started up, right on time, in late September.

But I’ll never forget how the decidedly not-Christian country of China has unofficially adopted the spirit of two western holidays—Halloween and Christmas—and turned them into one big mash-up of fun and partying at the end of December. 

The first year I spent in China, 2006, my partner and I took advantage of the long Christmas weekend given to the foreign English teachers at the school we were working in and flew up to Xi’an with some friends. Xi’an is the home of the Terracotta Warriors, one of the must-see sites in Asia. I was thrilled that we were going to see this historic place, and while a little bit homesick as always over the last two weeks of December, I didn’t mind skipping the holiday that year.

Larger-than-life Santas for sale on the sidewalk in Xi'an.

So I was truly surprised to find Xi’an all dressed up for a party. A huge Christmas tree, lights everywhere (well, Chinese cities usually have lights everywhere, but this was more than normal) and yes—even in the city that started the Silk Road—Christmas carols. 

We toured the Warriors in the daytime, and then in the evening headed over to the Muslim Quarter (one of Xi’an’s ancient districts) to have dinner. The fun of eating Muslim fare on Christmas in China was not lost on us. On the way, we met throngs of people out for a stroll. 

Sidewalks in China can get crowded, and what with one-point-however-many-billion people you see why, but these groups of people were mobbing the pavement. Vendors selling balloons and pinwheels (which are often bought in China on holidays as they’re believed to blow luck to you) did roaring business. Groups of girls wearing glowing devil’s horns over bright orange clown’s wigs tried to take sneaky pictures with us foreigners. Small children carried water-filled bags of tiny goldfish their parents had bought them—it wasn’t Christmas, it was a Halloween Carnival!

Twelve months later I looked forward to the spectacle, and thought I was prepared for it. To research a potential new job, my partner and I flew to another city over Christmas. We made sure we brought our cameras, even though it was primarily a business trip, and asked at the hotel for the best way to get downtown. This year, we decided, we wanted to photograph the action. 

A "snow" fight in Guiyang.

However, if we thought the broad avenues of Xi’an were flooded with people, we hadn’t anticipated what the narrow city streets of Guiyang, Guizhou province, would feel like when everyone was in good-time mode. 

Guizhou province is poor, and a lot of people from there go find work in the more prosperous east. The people who stay behind work hard for small wages. And apparently, love a chance to party. In Xi’an by comparison, our experience had been kind of sedate: groups of people walking, snapping photos and snacking. In Guiyang, bands of young men were ‘attacking’ gangs of young women with cans of silly string.  The laughing women would retaliate with aerosol cans of colored fake snow—the kind you use to frost and decorate windows in holiday season. By the end of a couple of hours on the street, you could spot the married men—they were the ones the girls had left out of the snow-fight.

Devil's horns on Christmas? Why not?

My favorite sight that night was a trio of girls, winter jackets and blue jeans completely covered in wads of silly string and blasts of fake snow, holding roses some boys had given them. They were writing words on the sidewalk in silly string, and then lighting the messages on fire. They had a hard time getting space on the sidewalk to do this, but once they announced their intention, they got plenty of area protected by the crowd of onlookers, myself included. To my English-teaching delight, they mostly wrote English words, “hello!” burned brightly, and then “I love you.”

I can’t remember now if anyone wrote, “Merry Christmas,” but the holiday was celebrated, all the same.

[Note: Read more about Beth’s trip to Xian  here , the trip to Guiyang here  ]

A Few of My Favorite Things

By Edith McClintock

When I was young, my parents preferred breaking traditions to following them. But Christmas, luckily, they left to my Midwestern Irish grandmas. One Catholic and one Protestant. And each year we rotated between them, one year in Florida, the next in Missouri. New and old. Hot and cold.

My Missouri grandmother always made my favorite pecan puff cookies and allowed us to open one present on Christmas Eve. We’d spend hours circling the tree, shaking and measuring, contemplating the hidden secrets of each box. Choosing right meant a night of gloating over siblings and cousins. Choosing wrong, despair and jealousy—for seven long hours until we could open the rest.

My Florida grandmother always made her jello-marshmallow Christmas salad—a tradition ripe for return! Either my aunt or grandfather dressed as Santa Claus, in a plastic red suit that fooled no one. After dinner, we’d ride out in her golf cart searching for lost golf balls, or lounge poolside reading Archie comics.

In high school and college, my sister and I began looking for our own holiday traditions, trying on various religions and foods and decorations. My sister introduced us to midnight mass, still one of my favorites. And with friends I celebrated Hanukkah and the Cuban Nochebuena, a Christmas Eve dinner with a roasted pig as the centerpiece. While living in Suriname in my twenties, a good friend informed me December is for family and relaxing, not work. A splendid idea I decided, adopting it immediately, although life rarely allows as long as I'd like.

But now that I’m living in the Pacific Northwest, my favorite Christmas tradition is to visit family and friends in Miami, and, as anywhere, curl in front of a Christmas tree with a good book and a fat cat. So as an ode to Christmas in Miami, I present a few of my favorite things (along with abject apologies to the original):

Café con leche and laze about days

Bright neon buildings and warm ocean waves

Pythons and ‘gators twisted in rings

These are a few of my favorite things

Long South Beach nights and salsa till three

Chickens in backyards but no hipsters to see

Sailboats that fly with the moon on their wings

These are a few of my favorite things

Two separate Christmases for both mom and for dad

A tree all in purple makes my mom twice as glad

My cute little nephew dressed in nothing

These are a few of my favorite things

Poolside at Audrey’s with all of the girls

The magic of sunset and islands scattered like pearls

Cool moonlit nights and hammocks gently aswing

These are a few of my favorite things

When the fog looms

When the rain falls

When the nights come too soon

I simply remember Miami is home

And soon I'll be quite tanned and new

Awful, I know, but I'm still following the rule that December is not for work.

For more, visit my author website and/or personal blog, A Wandering Tale. Even better, order a copy of Monkey Love & Murder on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or the Book Depository (free shipping nearly anywhere in the world).