New Year The Filipino Way

Traditionally Filipinos welcome new years with a Bang. Every home has its own way of making it special. They are very optimistic people. They viewed New Year as the time to mend and start once again for a better future.


New Year New Hope

In our family we have to do general cleaning before the New Year. All the entry point should be cleaned so that good luck will come smoothly. Everybody should be in the house before and during the changing of the year. We have 13 kinds of round sweet fruits, gold coins, chocolates, 5 pcs. of 50 pesos (hang in a stick) because this is reddish for good luck, long pastas or noodles (like spaghetti, pancit, sotanghon) for long life, sticky native delicacies (like tikoy, suman, inukay or biko, cassava cake etc.), for solidarity in the family and other sweets for money. We prepare plenty of foods. As much as possible the plate or the container of food should be round.
These are just our way of hoping and praying that the New Year will be different from the rest, the better one.
Before, we have to stay at home for the whole day of the first day of the New Year because it’s not good to spend money. We, the kids then would jump three times so that we would get taller (hahahaha unfortunately I did not).
Our neighbors would spend lots of money for fireworks to drive away bad spirits. But in our family we don’t do that we use incense while praying instead.