'Tis the Season for Pageants

Maligayang Pasko! (Merry Christmas!) Above a vendor sells traditional Christmas parols. Photo by Keith Bacongco at Wikipedia.

As I've said before, the "-ber" months are Christmas season in the Philippines: as in September 1 through December 31st. A quarter of a year. And it doesn't end on Christmas day, either. We attended one Christmas party on the 26th. There are so many, how could you fit them in before Christmas? Come on...

And it's not a Christmas party without singing and pageantry of some kind. At work I attended (yes, it was mandatory) three entirely separate Christmas concerts: one by the upper school choirs (choirs plural), one by the entire school's collection of choirs, and one by the middle school (a musical loosely based upon A Christmas Carol with Scrooge being played by the owner of a department store named Herod's--clever, eh?). Even at private parties, kids are toted out to sing rehearsed songs for the crowd of friends and neighbor's. My friend's daughter, Jet, did an impressive job with an a capella version of "Sk8tr Boy" by Avril Lavigne (see her picture above). One party we went to had a bit more class than the average fete: they had different live music acts every hour on the hour 'til the early light of the morning--jazz, rockabilly (pictured below), punk, dj...everything.
I don't know why performances are so important here, but they are an integral part of Filipino culture. Last year a video went viral from a Cebu prison where the prisoners (hundreds of them) practiced a remake of Michael Jackson's Thriller video from the '80s (complete with a bakla, or man in drag, dressed to play the girlfriend). Some people speculated that there was some sort of coercion involved with getting the prisoners to cooperate, but those comments clearly came from a Western mindset. The prisoners, I later heard from a Filipino source, were practicing for the local governor's visit. Since their worldwide YouTube fame, though, they've come up with some new numbers that you can check out.

Games are key, too--the latest crazy in the Philippines is a simple game called "Hip Hip Hooray," which seems to have derived from a local game show (see an excerpt here). To me, frankly, it would be much funnier as a drinking game, but strangely enough I've seen it twice stone cold sober at Christmas parties (with adults, mind you!). One of those times I played and lost (in my defense, it's deceptively hard when you're on the stage). Sometimes there's even a raffle at these events. Apparently my school had to end their faculty Christmas party because it was getting too expensive--they raffled off things like full-size fridges. When they had to cut back, they just decided if they couldn't do it right, don't do it at all. I can see their point now.

No, I don't have a musical number myself, much to Stephen's disappointment (he would like to see me make a fool of myself--a Christmas miracle?). I just barely get away with not doing anything, too. It seems everyone can sing karaoke here--even a few sales reps at local electronics and appliance stores are hired solely to sing karaoke to draw the customers in. By the end of the holidays I'm on auditory overload...yeah, right about now. But at least I have eight months to recover....What, Chinese New Year's in less than a month? Here we go again...