Amid Soaring Inflation, Filipinos Celebrate Upcoming Christmas With Mixed Feelings

• Published date: 23 December 2022
• Publication title: ASEAN Tribune

23 December 2022 (NAM NEWS NETWORK) MANILA, Dec 23 (NNN-PNA) - As early as Oct, Ellen Reyes booked a resort villa in Laguna province, south of the Philippine capital and famous for hot-spring bathhouses, planning to spend Christmas eve there, with her whole family. She will have to pay 26,000 pesos (roughly 470 U.S. dollars) for an overnight stay.

Marielle Catbagan and her friends of over 30 years, also got together early this month to enjoy native Filipino food, and sip Italian fine wine in a friend's house, their favorite hangout place since the late 1980s.

Christmas is marked by big celebrations in the Philippines, where most of its population professes the Catholic faith. It is the time when Filipino families and friends gather for yearly reunions, weddings, and endless parties. They celebrate Christmas for four months, starting in Sept and ending in Jan.

Shopping malls, decked with Christmas trimmings and blinking lights, and playing Christmas carols, to bring festivity to mall-goers, now operate at full capacity as COVID-19 infections and hospitalisation become manageable.

Filipinos broke so many festive Christmas traditions in 2020 and 2021, as the country grapples with a steady increase in COVID-19 cases.

From a steep of nearly 40,000 daily cases in Jan this year, Department of Health officer-in-charge, Maria Rosario Vergeire, said, coronavirus transmission has plateaued mid-Dec, with the current seven-day moving average at 1,100 per day.

Masking, although still recommended, is now optional in most settings, and face-to-face classes have resumed.

Filipinos are celebrating Christmas with 'revenge' this year, meeting maskless with kin and friends for the first time in three years.

Traffic jams are back in Metro Manila, the country's economic and business centre, with nearly 13.5 million people, as people rush to Christmas parties, holiday shopping, and reunions.

Many mall operators say, shopper traffic has returned to 2019 pre-pandemic levels. People can now linger in shopping malls, eat in restaurants and watch movies in cinemas. Shoppers also flocked to flea markets that crop up during the holiday season.

The Philippine economy has steadily recovered from the pandemic, with six consecutive quarters of robust expansion, after five successive quarters of negative gross domestic product (GDP) growth, beginning in the first quarter of 2020.

'In 2022, recall that we have thus far been able to attain an average GDP growth of 7.7 percent, which puts us on track to...