ahiyas (overleaf)! The “precious offering” in May when the town of Lucban in Quezon Province becomes a blaze of color as each house is covered with flowers. Originally, a pagan harvest festival, Pahiyas is now given in the honor of San Isidro Labrador, the farmer’s patron saint.

            Although the word fiesta is Spanish, Filipinos have made it their own. It is not unusual for entire towns to participate in the celebration. Planning can take up to a year, and the decorations, costumes and events are often both expensive and lavish.

            Like Pahiyas, almost every major fiesta in the Philippines has its roots in the pre-colonial period. The god Bathala created the land and the sea and his creations have always been part of the actual and mystical way of live in the Philippines. The sea and the land provide food and shelter, but the spirits of nature who dwell in these places are not always benign and must be appeased. When the Spaniards came they brought with them a new God and new spirits who had to be honored too. To the adaptable Filipino, a celebration for one god should please another as well.

            Principal fiesta themes are fertility and planting, harvest, adoration and supplication. Sometimes they can be a combination of several themes such as the danced rites at Obando, which is both a supplication of infertile women to San Pascual and Santa Clara to bless them with a child hand a thanksgiving for a bountiful harvest.

            The Ati-Atihan held on Kalibo, Aklan is another combined festival. Originally it was celebrated by the Negritos (Ati) to commemorate their new friendship with the Bornean datus. However, four or five centuries later, the Panay Filipinos borrowed the festival to celebrate the Santo Niño’s intervention on their behalf against the marauding pirates of Mindanao.

            While Christmas and Easter are purely Christian festivals, the enterprising Filipinos are always quick to make any fiesta reflect their own baroque spirit. During Christmas, which officially begins nine days before Christmas Eve (actually it can begin as early as September 1^st) and ends with the Fest of the Three Kings, is the longest Yuletide celebration in the world. The symbol of Christmas in the Philippines is not the Christmas tree, but the parol, a five-pointed paper star lantern that probably had its origins in the Mexicans piñata. While they come in all sizes, the electric parols of Pampanga stand 20 to 30 feet high, giving off a blaze of kaleidoscopic color and light that fills the evening sky.

Easter, celebrated in the Philippines as Holy Week, means fiesta and every barrio hosts a procession or a feast. Many barrios bring out elaborate, flower-draped processional carrozas (hand-pulled carts) carrying full-size figure's of the characters in the Easter story and parade them through town. One of the most colorful pageants during Easter is the Moriones held in Marinduque, where the celebrants don oversized Roman legionnaire masks and reenact the legend of "longinus According to St. John./I All over the Philippines, but primarily in the provinces of Pampanga, laguna and Batangas, pen itents perform the rite of flagellation, some allowing themselves to be crucified.

One of the most famous devotional processions is the Feast of the Black Nazarene in Quiapo, Manila. Thousands of men (it is an all-male fiesta) work their way to the carroza carrying a life-size image of the kneeling Christ to touch their handkerchief to the statue. The handkerchief which actually touches the icon is said to have healing powers.

While at most of the fiestas the processionals involve humans, in Pulilan, Bulacan the carabao, the national beast of burden, is the principal participant. It is the farmer's fiesta for the patron saint of husbandry, San Isidro, and on this special day the carabao is king. The animals is groomed and decorated with flowers, paraded in the streets and taught to kneel in front of the church.

In a country that has an extensive river system it is not surprising that some of the fiesta processions are held offshore. One of them, the Peñafrancia Festival, is held on a tributary of the Bicol River where a barge called "pagoda" parades the image of the Virgin before her devotees lining the banks of six provinces.