Halloween Filipino Style!
By: Miriam Escander
If ever there was a holiday that deserves to be commercialized, it’s Halloween. It comes second only to Christmas and kids and adults can both enjoy it. I am especially attentive to Halloween, because it happens that I was born on Halloween. So for me it has always been a special occasion.
In many countries, Halloween is celebrated on October 31st, but in the Philippines, due to a strong Catholic tradition, we celebrate it on the first two days of November. November 1st is All Saints Day (Araw ng mga Santo) and November 2nd is All Souls Day (Araw ng mga Patay). We spend these two days remembering our dead loved ones and you will find most of us at the cemetery or a memorial park. We don’t celebrate these days with tricks and treats. When we visit the cemetery we bring candles with different designs, different colours and amazing smells, as well as nice and beautifully arranged flowers.
When you go and live in a foreign country, you might feel amazed at how a favourite holiday is celebrated there, how different. That is what I have experienced here in Singapore. Halloween as is celebrated here started in Britain and other parts of Northern Europe as part of the ancient Celtic Religion. I’ve been working here for 12 years yet only last year experienced my first Halloween celebration with my friends. It was a lot of fun and vey exciting, though I did have some difficulty in saying NO to dressing up and putting on Halloween make-up. That’s the thrill and highlight of having a Halloween party.
Here in Singapore, a few weeks before, you can already sense that Halloween is just around the corner. Shopping malls display Halloween stuff. Adults, teens and especially kids are getting more excited every single day. Take for example the 4 year old boy I look after. The whole family was invited by a friend to attend their Halloween party. They started planning their costumes and he was excitedly counting the remaining days left before the big day. Every morning he would tell me “Miriam, 5 more days more to go before Halloween!”
He said that every day until the big event. That morning, when I was making coffee for myself, I asked him, “How many days left before he Halloween?”
He showed me his clenched fist and said “ZERO”
I could not stop myself from laughing. The excitement on his face made him look even more adorable. When we arrived at the venue, we saw hanging balloons with Halloween designs, amazing food, residents with their kids wearing scary costumes, and a corner for the games they prepared. At the end of the event, everybody was looking tired and exhausted, especially the kids, but I could see the happiness and satisfaction on their faces.
When we got home and I was already on bed, I looked at the pictures I took, and suddenly reminisced about the Halloween we used to celebrate when I was a kid.
In the Philippines, a week before, we start to clean up the cemeteries and the graves of our love ones; the graves get a layer of fresh paint and everything is made ready for the visits on November 1st and 2nd. People from other places start going back to their hometowns to visit their dead loved ones. Airports are packed, as are ships and buses.
You might think we have a very boring Halloween, I mean cemeteries, graves, prayers and all, make it seem like a serious affair. Not so. Spending Halloween in the cemeteries is a fun event. It is like a mini-reunion for families and friends alike, a chance to be with those people that we see only once a year. Tents, shelters, chairs and tables are set up in front of the gravesites to provide a place for families and their visitors to stay and talk. Best of all, food and drinks are overflowing during this time, with families bringing basket of foods and drinks to share with others. Food we prepare is not the same as food here, we make native delicacies called “kakanin” some of which are only prepared during Halloween. I remember when I was a kid, my grandmother used to tell us not to eat the food that they cooked until it had been offered to the dead loved ones. We do this by taking a small portion of each food and put in a corner with candles.
If I am to compare the way Halloween is celebrated today and before, I’ll still choose to celebrate the “BEFORE”, it was so much more fun than these days.
There you have it. Halloween Filipino style. It is definitely different but equally as interesting as the Halloween celebration in other parts of the world…