all saints' day

We don't typically celebrate Halloween here, though we used to rush home every Saturday to watch the spooky special on Magandang Gabi Bayan, where now Vice president Noil de Castro would showcase scary stories and places they covered with matching godawful special effects supposed to scare but turn out really funny, instead.

Every year on the 1st of November, Filipino families troop to the cemetery to visit their departed loved ones. As with all family gatherings in our country, this becomes a fiesta. There's food and drinks and stories are shared not about the dead but about each other. Fortunately, loud music has been banned so there is still some solemnity mixed with bouts of laughter. my nephew Sherwin hams it up for the camera.

When we were kids, we would play with the candle drippings and form all sorts of toys with it. I resisted the urge to make a rose like I used to make and just watched the kids make a ball of candle wax and had to smile at the sense of wonder and the pride they got from watching their ball of wax grow larger. If my aunt Diche /Fernanda were still alive she would tell us playing with candles will make you wet your bed! :) I forgot to tell Bien that his dad used to gather the wax and sell them for a small sum to people who would turn them into candles again. Since they paid so little, some kids would cheat by covering a heavy stone with wax to get more cash. Don't know if the buyers were ever fooled, though.