Pasko na! Kampanya na!

SINGKIT -The first sign of Christmas in my apartment is a small white parol knitted by the mothers at Knitting Expedition in Uhaji, Ifugao. I've decided to Pasko-ize my place in stages this year; after that little parol maybe I'll work on a centerpiece for my dining table this weekend. Slow by slow (dahan-dahan), as they say.

- DOREEN G. YU

When I was a kid a real pine tree would take pride of place in the sala by early December (which, by today's timeline, is really late; these last few years I put up the decorations right after All Saints' Day). The tree exuded a wonderful pine scent and would shed needles that had to be swept up every morning. We had "snow" from a can sprayed on the branches. When we moved out of the old house in the family compound on San Rafael street we stopped having a live tree – I'm not sure why, maybe because by then we were no longer little kiddies awed by the office truck bringing in a real tree.

In the house on Piña street we had a tall plastic tree – until one night it came crashing down into a tangled mess of branches and strings of lights, the ornaments smashed to smithereens. Since then we've not had a tree.

Since moving to a condo unit two decades ago the decorations have had to be scaled down. I bought a 12-inch tree made of coconut branches painted gold at a Negros trade fair. A friend gifted me one Christmas with a 24-inch gold-hued tree, which is still around but which I am repurposing this year into other forms of decoration.