Her coconut tree wouldn’t yield any coconuts.
And so Norma Domingo, accustomed to making the best of what she’s given, gathered up a small bundle of spathes — another part of the tree — and did what she could.
The result was a prize-winning parol at Sunday’s Pasko! sa FilCom Christmas celebration at the Filipino Community Center in Waipahu.
Domingo teamed with Veronica Vallejos to create the star-shaped lantern, a creative take on the traditional parols that decorate Filipino homes during the holidays.
"It reminds me of the parols we used to make in school," said Domingo.
The parol-making contest was a new wrinkle in an event that has become a holiday staple over the past 20 years.
Sponsored by the Filipino Community Center and the Filipino Association of University Women in conjunction with several other Filipino community groups, this year’s Pasko! also included traditional Filipino foods, games, crafts, a Visayan cooking demonstration, a choral competition, folk tale readings, and performances by Banda Kawayan, Himig at Indak and others.
The emotional highlight of the event was a presentation of the Panunuluyan, a musical re-enactment of Joseph and Mary’s search for lodging on the night Jesus was born. The Panunuluyan, a shortened version of the nine-day Posadas ritual that originated in Spain and is still practiced in Latin America, is traditionally performed in Tagalog and Bicol regions of the Philippines.
Alma Averion and her family caught just the tail end of the performance, but it was enough to transport Averion back to her childhood home in Lucena City in southern Luzon.
"I love that story," Averion said. "It shows Jesus’ humility. He was a king yet no one welcomed him. He was king, yet he was born in a manger. That’s the story of Christmas."
The event lent itself to other messages.
Caterer Reynaldo Ramiro, who tends to the community center’s traditional Filipino garden, won the Christmas table tree contest with an arboreal creation he titled "Whispering Hope."
Ramiro constructed his tree from dried ferns gathered at Valley of the Temples and vegetation he brought from the Philippines. He said his creation was meant as a symbol of hope following the devastation of Typhoon Pablo, which killed more than 1,000 people in the Philippines last week, and a message against unchecked logging, which has been blamed with exacerbating the typhoon’s damage.
"My tree emulates hope and resiliency," Ramiro said.
The University of the Philippines Alumni Association organized the parol contest as a "walang sayang" ("no waste") challenge in which participants were tasked with crafting traditional or freestyle parols out of recycled materials.
"We want to promote sustainability and encourage people to look at things in a different way," said organizer Carolyn Weygan-Hildebrand.
The challenge yielded impressive results, with amateur artisans coaxing aesthetic beauty from malunggay branches, coffee filters, used clothes and other castoffs.
Nine-year-old Edin Utrera and her sister Alyssa, 7, spent hours working on their first-ever parols.
"It makes you proud," said Edin, who also made her first-ever banana lumpia earlier in the day.
Eric and Fe Carlos brought their American-born children Elisabeth, 14, and Erin, 5, to get a taste of traditional Filipino culture.
"I remember doing this as a kid," Fe Carlos said, adding some snow-white trim to a parol made of bamboo and Christmas wrapping. "I just want to expose them to how we grew up."
