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We had a blast making these beautiful, colorful bamboo framed lanterns called parol. Christmas is a huge celebration in the Philippines. I still remember all of our family traditions. "Simbang Gabi", or midnight mass with the family on Christmas Eve...big family get togethers where we stay up until midnight laughing and eating and then opening gifts...the food! SO MUCH FOOD. If you've ever been to a Filipino celebration, you'll know what I'm talking about. Noodle dishes called pancit, egg rolls called lumpia, and so many other treats shared with family and friends. One of the most beautiful decorations I've ever seen is the parol. These colorful lanterns can be seen everywhere in the Philippines, and seeing them brings me back to my childhood.
In the Philippines, these are used to decorate homes during Christmas, and represents the Star of Bethlehem, or the Christmas Star. It is traditionally made with a bamboo frame and covered with thin tissue paper or thin shells called capiz shells. They are usually also illuminated from within using a light bulb. For ours, we decided to forego the light, and just make them into beautiful hanging lanterns.
Here is a great instructional video on how to make it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_8MknrMCxA
The trickiest part of probably the assembling of the frame. I used a hot glue gun to put in the dowels to make it 3 dimensional, so that part of the project should be for the grown ups.
After the frame was made, came the fun part of using this brightly colored cellophane to cover the star. You can make them all one color or mix things up like we did. If you can't find cellophane, you can also use tissue paper or crepe paper.
You can make it as fancy or as simple as you like. For us, we decided to opt out of adding the tails to it and instead made little puffs out of tissue paper to put on each of the points of the star.
We were able to obtain all of our supplies on Amazon, which was pretty convenient. Overall, a fun way to spend an afternoon.
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