Christmas was invented in the Philippines. Nothing makes Filipinos hornier: no white skin, no videoke, no jeepney towelling, no balut. The pre-Christmas season officially begins in the Philippines two weeks after Easter and builds up to a national bliss gangbang of epic proportions by December.
Everyone is extremely fond of everyone. Only the employers don’t love their employees, because they have to wear the worst hat creations for months on end, which clearly violate the Geneva Conventions. The Filipinos from the small islands come over to the big ones to shop and return as walking mountains of presents. The soundtrack: Jingle bells on techno, 180 BPM. Knecht Ruprecht dies of a heart attack.
The already well-attended churches are now bursting at the seams. Loudspeakers are installed in the forecourts. Together with the Christmas palms hung with fairy lights, this creates an unbeatably blissful end-of-year atmosphere. But the priests remain well-behaved.
The Filipinos even start making Christmas decorations three weeks before Easter. Excesses of this magnitude require proper planning and an infinite number of hard-working hands. It amazes me that even a democracy can act so homogeneously. The most popular decorations are large three-dimensional poinsettias made from wooden sticks. Covered with colourful plastic foil, they adorn even the smallest jungle path for kilometres. On both sides.
But the most important thing for the Filipinos is the Christmas tree, the orgasm of the Christmas season, so to speak. Give a Filipino a knitting needle, a toilet bowl, some phosphorus, a pencil and a plastic bag. If you don’t have a perfectly styled and festively illuminated Christmas tree in front of you within five minutes, it wasn’t a Filipino. Filipinos build Christmas trees out of anything: palm fronds, coconuts, plastic bags, mats, construction steel, coral, shells, beer bottles. Their creativity is endless. I’m standing in front of a Christmas tree made from chainsaws, grinning and wishing you all a Merry Christmas!
Frank Woelky, born in 1973. Kitesurfer since 1998. Since 2006, I have been combining kitesurfing and web design on trips lasting several months off the beaten track.