The food : We always have pork or chicken barbecue's, buko salad (coconut meat mixed with other tropical fruits in sweetened condensed milk - now that's sweet!), charcoal grilled seafood and veggies, and shell fish.
For New Year: We always have the 12 varieties of round fruits, and lots and lots of sweet traditional cakes and delicacies. Mom always hung grapes above all of our windows and doors - she believes it brings in prosperity. We too place coins on our window sills again to encourage more success and good fortune.
Decoration: We do have Christmas tree - not living tree though. We have a "parol" which is the Christmas star. Sorry no pix! It is basically a star made out of bamboo and is loaded with Christmas light of all colors, it is placed normally by our windows or front door.
Festivities: We open presents on Christmas day, that is after we come back from midnight mass which is actually not at midnight but at 11PM...thus we open presents at around 12midnight . the youngest mostly opens the presents first since they are the ones who has the most...so we are normally just excited to see how they react. On Christmas day,we all get together at Grandma's house and have a potluck all day or night long...
On New Year's day, we meet the new year with lots of noise and tons of sparkles. Everybody should be awake at midnight and all the kids are told to jump as high as they could so they'll grow more - (hmmm I should have jumped more!) and our parents give us new bills and tons of coins as our New years money. This is the day when you are suppose to behave the best since my Mom believes that whatever we do on New years day reflects on how we might behave all year through - huh? That never made sense to me but for some reason it did stick in my mind to be nice and behave well on New years day. I guess that is the one day I can guarantee that I'd be nice! Then on the 1st day of January, we go to church and head straight to the beach to take a plunge and cleanse ourselves from the old year and meet the new year - refreshed!
Here's my family after church on Christmas eve...my sister Rhiza is taller than my sister Maybel now. I guess she jumped more or higher than Maybel on New year's day when she was young...ha ha.
5 comments:
Stop, you are making me hungry! That food looks great.
Love the picture, looks like a very fun family celebration.
Kevin
maybe you were supposed to be good on New Year's day to help the adults recover from New Year's eve!
hmmm good theory, never thought of that.
I vote we all go to Lhes's for the holidays next year and do it up!
Also I think of the year as a round dial moving counterclockwise (January is from 12 to 11. February is the 10 O'clock hour.) Kevin does not think of it that way. I think time's a slinky
A
I think of time as counter-clockwise too - never thought about it before!
Mom
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