Forget the twelve days of Christmas; in the Philippines it’s more like 130.

Not a country to be outdone when it comes to the annual celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, the Philippines is known for having the world’s longest Christmas season. Revellers can be heard singing carols as early as September, and these energetic carollers don’t put their voices to rest until the third Sunday of January. 

This archipelago of more than 7,000 tropical islands is Southeast Asia’s largest Christian country. With 90% of the population being Christian, coral-stone churches and incense-waving priests replace the Buddhist temples and monks found elsewhere in the region.

With homes, churches and shopping malls dressed up for the long festive season, it’s hard to escape Christmas in the Philippines, home to some of the most passionate festive celebrations outside of the Vatican. 

Verses of scriptures are spray-painted onto the city’s tricycles, colourful jeepneys are festooned with lights, mirrors and horns. Christmas lanterns, or parol, traditionally made from rattan and covered with rice paper, hang from windows and doors while renditions of Isaac Watts’ ‘Joy to the World’ and Wham’s pop classic ‘Last Christmas’ reverberate across streets throughout the country.

The main event, a nine-day novena of early morning masses (simbang gabi), starts on December 16 when the ringing of church bells break the pre-dawn silence in the days leading up to Christmas. The Church of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, one of the country’s oldest churches, in Bohol is usually home to three life-sized papier-mâché models of the Three Kings and is a great place to enjoy salabat, a warm ginger drink, and bibingka, a flat, thick yellow rice cake, traditionally offered at this time of year.

Manila is a great place to be for Christmas Eve, or pannunuluyan, where locals put on an elaborate re-enactment of the events surrounding Joseph and Mary’s journey to Bethlehem in search of lodging on the eve of the birth of their son. Embracing the Filipinos’ love for music, this procession is carried out in song as ‘Joseph’ and ‘Mary’ sing their way down streets looking for somewhere to stay, only to be rebutted in song by inn keeper after inn keeper.

The crescendo of this drama comes at midnight with the birth of Jesus Christ in a stable. Amid ringing bells and blowing whistles, devout worshippers flock to mass, after which families return home for noche buena, a grand feast of spit-roasted pork.

For Filipinos, faith is almost as important as family. And come rain or come shine, Christmas, widely considered the Philippines’ third season, is a wonderful time of the year to visit this vibrant Land of Fiestas.