Panagbenga Festival

The Panagbenga Festival is held yearly during the month of February. The celebrations are held for over a month and peak periods are the weekends. The Panagbenga Festival showcases the many floral floats and native dances. The fragrant smells that could be presently teasing olfactory senses are probably less from the now-dried flowers from Valentine's Day than air floating all the way from Baguio City. At this time of year, the City of Pines is almost surely in flower fury over Panagbenga festival, the city's biggest festival.

Panagbenga is a kankanaey term for "a season of blooming." It is also known as the Baguio Flower Festival, a homage to the beautiful flowers the city is famous for as well as a celebration of Baguio's re-establishment. Since February 1995, it has been held to help Baguio forget the 1990 earthquake that distressed much of the city.

Panagbenga festival will have spectators enjoying a multiple floral and float parades over two days. The Baguio Flower Festival Association (BFFA) will have a street dancing parade and band exhibition. The Baguio Flower Festival Foundation (BFFF), meanwhile, will hold a parade. So where should spectators be stationed to not miss any of the float and floral parades? Session Road and Burnham Park. A search for the Mr. and Ms. Baguio Flower Festival, FM Panagbenga Pop Fiesta, Skateboard competition and Dolls of Japan exhibit were added to the BFFA calendar. The festival is supported by constituents of La Trinidad, La Union, Pangasinan, Marinduque and Masbate.

Often a Cañao is an undertaken to kick-off & celebrate the occasion. A Cañao is a dance that also is regularly performed at special occasions such as fiestas. In this two-person dance, the men hang blankets usually woven with an indigenous pattern or design-over each shoulder. The woman wraps a single similar blanket around her. The man leads her and dances in a circle with a hop-skip tempo to the beat of sticks and gongs. The dance must continue until the viewers decide to honor the dancers twice with a shout of "Ooo wag, hoy! hoy!" Once this has happened, the dancers can stop. It is an honor to be invited to join the dance, and elders and other respected members of the community are expected to join in at every occasion.

HISTORY
It all began in 1995 when lawyer; Damaso E. Bangaoet, Jr., John Hay Poro Point Development Corporation (JPDC) Managing Director for Camp John Hay, offered to the Board of Directors of JPDC the idea of organizing the holding of a flower festival in Baguio City. The Board, then directed by the Bases Conversion Development Authority (BCDA) Chairman Victor A. Lim and JPDC President Rogelio L. Singson, approved the project immediately. It was also decided that the Festival be held every February.

From the very start, JPDC saw itself as the maker, not the producer of the Festival. As a result, its plan was to present the idea to the different sectors of the community: government, education, business, media and civic organizations. This was not only to solicit their support, but also to gather their suggestions and ideas. Their response was generally warm and immediate, except for a few doubting Thomases. Nevertheless, the idea had fallen on fertile ground. It grew as a wellspring of community support fed resources into the project. The Baguio Flower Festival was an idea on its way to becoming a reality.

Making the idea a reality fell into the hands of the BFF Secretariat which was chaired by Attorney Bangaoet and operated by JPDC staff and volunteers led by Eric Jonathan Picart. In Addition, an advisory group of flower enthusiasts like Rebecca Domogan, Gloria Vergara, Julie Cabato, Willie Magtibay and Efren Chat was formed. They began by creating an identity for the Festival, one that would reflect the history, traditions and values of Baguio and the Cordilleras. In October 1995, the Baguio Flower Festival obtained face. Its official logo was chosen from entries to the Annual Camp John Hay Art Contest. The competition was open to elementary, high school and college students of Baguio. Its theme revolved around preserving the environment with a special importance on the flowers of the Cordillera. Instead of a complete painting, the eminent board of judges led by well-known artist BenCab chose a spray of sunflowers on the corner of the entry submitted by Trisha Tabangin, a student of the Baguio City National High School.

Shortly thereafter, a Festival hymn was composed by Professor Macario Fronda of Saint Louis University. To this music was added the rhythm and movements of the Bendian dance, an Ibaloi dance of celebration. The Bendian dance's circular movements speak of unity and harmony among members of the tribe - themes that foretell the coming together of the various sectors of the community to bring the Baguio Flower Festival to life.

Obando Fertility Festival

Obando Fertility Rites is a Filipino dance ritual. Every year, during the month of May, to the tune of musical instruments made out of bamboo materials, the men, women and children of Obando, Bulacan, Philippines wear traditional dance costumes to dance on the streets followed by the images of their patron saints San Pascual (St. Paschal), Santa Clara (St. Claire) and Nuestra Señora de Salambao (Our Lady of Salambao), while singing the song Santa Clara Pinung-Pino.

Purpose
Among the fiesta participants to the fertility dance are foreigners from other towns in the Philippines, most are asking the patron saints for a son or a daughter, a husband or a wife or good fortune. They are all dancing on the streets as a form of a religious procession primarily in order for the spirit of life to enter into the wombs of women. This is the magic and mystery of Obando, Bulacan.

The feast days or dance festivals are held for three consecutive days: May 17 for St. Paschal, May 18 for St. Claire and May 19 for the Our Lady of Salambaw.

The Philippine national hero, José Rizal, mentioned this fertility dance ritual in his Spanish novel, the Noli Me Tangere.

History
The ancient Filipinos once held a ritual known as the Kasilonawan headed by a katalonan or high priestess. The ritual normally lasts for nine days and usually involves drinking, singing and dance, and is normally held at the home of a datu or barangay chieftain. This ritual became important to early Filipinos because they value of fertility that could also mean wealth or abundance of every individual person. A barren woman was once considered as a member of the lowest class in Philippine society and suffered stigma and mockery. Because of this reason, it became important to perform the fertility rites so that the women could become productive. The god known as Linga, a force of nature, became the center of the Kasilonawan ritual.

Upon the arrival of the Franciscan missionaries to the Philippines, they built churches to propagate the Christianity and introduced Catholic saints. In Obando, Bulacan the Spanish Franciscans introduced a trio or a triangle of saints, namely St. Claire, St. Pascual and the Our Lady of Salambao in order to replace the traditional pagan gods.

The current images at the altar of Obando Church are replicas, sculpted with the financial assistance of the people of Obando. The originals were destroyed during World War II.

Higantes Festival

Adding color and gaiety to Angono town fiesta, celebrated early the 23rd of November, are the "Higantes", paper to mache to giants measuring four to five feet in diameter and ten to twelve feet in height. Philippine Rizal Angono's joyous major festival in honor of San Clemente (patron saint of fishermen) whose image, glorious in papal vestment, is carried by male devotees during a procession accompanied by "pahadores” (devotees dressed in colorful local costumes or fishermen’s clothes, wooden shoes and carrying boat paddles, fish nets, traps, etc.) and “higantes" (giant paper mache images). The street event finishes in a fluvial procession in Laguna de Bay amidst revelry that continues until the image is brought back to its sanctuary.

HISTORY
The “higantes” tradition began last century, when Angono was a Spanish hacienda. The hacienda owners concerned about costs prohibited all celebrations except for one annual fiesta. The townspeople concerned about enjoyment decided to make the best of a bad situation. Using an art form brought from Mexico by Spanish priests, they created larger-than-life caricatures of their Spanish landlords. In typical Filipino fashion, the fiesta become in equal parts, a stunning spectacle and a tricky inside joke. There too was a story that a French man happened to pass by this coastal town of Laguna de Bay as he cruised from Manila Bay. Captivated by the town being divided by a river, he predicted that someday giants would come out and become famous. True to his words, Angono can show off of two national artists - Carlos "Botong" Francisco in the field of visual arts and Professor Lucio D. San Pedro in the field of music. There are other Angono sons and daughters who are becoming big or giants on their chosen field of endeavor. Paper mache making is an art that is known back during the Spanish Era. The head of the giants is fashioned from a mold made of clay, which is dried under the heat of the sun.

With the advent of modernization and technology clay is changed to plaster of Paris and resin. The mold is then pasted with lots of newspapers then split into the middle and sun-dried, after which it is then pasted with the brown paper (the slit being covered) then sun-dried again and painted. The body is made of bamboo, but other materials like yantok (rattan) and thin iron bars can also be used. Yards are yards of clothing materials and accessories complete the costume of the "Higantes". Before, Angono town fiesta features a "Mag-anak" (family) Higantes consists of three figures, the father, the mother and the son. In 1987, Mr. Perdigon Vocalan visualized the idea of having a Higante Festival wherein all the barangays in Angono(13 of them) are to be represented by two to four Higantes symbolizing the industry or the personality of the barangay. This idea materialized with the funding given by the Dept. of Tourism and Provincial Tourism Office thus in a year after a seminar and a workshop in Higante Making , the fiesta was flooded with thirty-nine different Higantes. In that year too, there was a contest among the Higantes, thus one can see them a Higante with a duck on its head and another one a basketful of duck eggs representing a barangay that known for its fried itik and balut-making.

Antipolo Pilgrimage

All throughout the month of May, pilgrimages are made to the town of Antipolo, Rizal, a rustic community in the hills east of Manila, where the centuries-old image of the Virgin of Antipolo, also called Nuestra Señora de la Paz y Buen Viaje (Our Lady of Peace and Good Voyage), is enshrined. This wooden image was fashioned by skilled craftsmen in Mexico and was brought to Manila by the Spanish governor-general, Don Juan Niño de Tabora, in the year 1626. Often referred to as the Voyager Virgin, this image accompanied many galleon trips back and forth between Manila and Acapulco from 1626 to 1746.


Attributed with miraculous powers, pilgrims from all over the country, all throughout May, come to hear mass at the Voyager Virgin’s shrine, sample the waters from the Baño de la Virgen near the church, which are supposed to have curative powers, then bathe in the Hinulugang Taktak waterfalls, a few kilometers downhill from the shrine.


In the earlier days, a visit to Antipolo was marked by much merrymaking. With access to the place mainly done by foot, ladies were carried on hammocks carried on the shoulders of sturdy young men. The pilgrim party would bring its own food and music and the trip would be as much occasion for merrymaking as the festivities in Antipolo itself. Today, Antipolo, actually no more than 29 kilometers from Manila, is but a few minutes by car through excellent highways and typical Philippine rural countryside. But, still, the trip and the visit are marked by much merriment and gaiety.