The Philippines has the longest Christmas season of anywhere in the world. One can start to see decorations and hear the music as early as August although the official kickoff is the "ber" months (i.e., SeptemBER). This year it started later or I am just getting better about ADDing it.
We started decorating for Christmas late (again, relative to where we live). Perfect example: when we were hanging spiderwebs and positioning a headless man in our window for Halloween (our village participates in Trick or Treating woo hoo!!), our neighbor up the street was hanging up his Christmas lights. We started our decorating the day after Thanksgiving because that was the day we picked up our tree from S&R.
S&R ships in Douglas firs from Oregon for the Christmas season which rocks my world because I hate plastic trees. They are just not my thing. I have to have the nice pine smell for Christmas. For P3799 (about $75) I bought a real tree. It smells fantastic!! Admittedly, I am not 100% positive it will stay green until new years but I am optimistic. I went with a friend of mine and we picked out the best tree (read greenest) we could find and I think it looks great. Please note I am not one of those people that decorates trees beautifully. In fact, I have a friend coming over this week to redo the tree because she says it looks cruddy with my hastily bought decorations. In my defense, I impulse bought sale balls, random candy canes, and was assisted in my decorating by my creative team (a 5-year-old and a 4-year-old).
We bought a plain wreath and had a niece decorate it with berries and pine cones for the front door.
The staircase garland looks way cooler in real life because the little presents are lights that light up. Each 9' garland costs P150 (about $3) so life is good there!
Ah, this is my Santa Claus that we have dangling from the lights. It is paper-mache and we got him for the bargain price of P200 (about $4) in Paete, Laguna.
For some reason, people kept warning me against putting lights on my tree. I am not sure why. I am feeding it lots of sugar water and bought the overpriced lights that do not heat up too much. Although everyone told me that if I do not put lights on it, the tree will last longer, I find that akin to the people who put plastic on their couches. Sure, your couch will last forever, but who the fuck wants to sit on it????**Side note--Mike at S&R Congressional is the coolest guy ever!! Not only did he not let us steal a tree that someone had reserved, he tolerated us picking a tree all the way in the back. Best employee ever!!!**
