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| 1980, STEVE OWLSEN LANTERN |
O OWLY NIGHT: THE LANTERN THAT STARTED IT ALL-- OUR "STEVE OWLSTEN" PAROL, Christmas 1980. I remember the day when our holiday home decorating took a turn for the strange, the outrageous, and for many of our neighbors—the bizarre. Three years before the infamous E.T. lantern, we siblings, conceived of a way to transform our roof into a veritable Christmas display a la Manila C.O.D. We resisted all traditional lantern forms— star, Oriental-inspired, box lanterns---and decided to come up with an animal-inspired lantern to rival our previous Santa’s reindeer display. We did not have to look far for an inspiration. That year, we caught an OWL that strayed in our backyard---and that was how the queerest of birds became our pet (we had a pet monkey before that). We named our pet owl “Steve Owlsten”, after 6 Million Dollar Man’s Steve Austin (played by actor Lee Majors), which was still a big hit on TV that time. But alas, our big-eyed bird Steve died in captivity---and as a supreme tribute to the wide-eyed fowl, we crafted a lantern in his likeness, fashioned from used cardboard packaging. It had super big cellophane eyes which could be lit from the inside, if I remember right. And it was kinda tall, with pointed ears that made him looked like a cross between a horned carabao and a bird. As soon as we hanged our STEVE OWLSTEN Parol creation outside our 2nd floor window, it became our neighbors' conversation piece. Maybe it reminded oldtimers that once, Pampanga had fish-shaped lanterns---the fish being a symbol for Christ. But an OWL lantern? Well---we just tell people that “ the wise bird is the symbol of the 3 Wise Men, haller, don’t you know that??!”
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| 1981, MEDUSA LANTERN |
BE GOOD, FOR GOODNESS SNAKES: OUR MEDUSA PAROL, Christmas1981. If looks could kill, our Medusa head lantern from Christmas 1981 would have killed the whole neighborhood, or turned the neighbors to stone. We were inspired by our favorite 1981 movie, “Clash of the Titans” to create this Gorgon head---the serpentine hairstyle was fashion from coconut inflorescences—those clump of flower twigs that look like slithering “snakes” from a distance. In the Greek myth, Medusa was beheaded by Perseus—here, acted out by my brother Michael Castro—who only needed a P.M.T. sword to do the job. For our many horrified neighbors, this Medusa head was their worst nightmare before Christmas!!!!
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| 1982, HANGMAN LANTERN |
NO CHANCE OF PAROL(E): OUR HANGMAN LANTERN, Christmas 1982. This is the lantern that sent our poor Mother screaming bloody hell and left her so upset! I recall her ordering us to bring it down immediately-but to no avail. I think our holiday decorating reached its dismal, abyssmal depths in 1982, with this tasteless, totally improper human parol, complete with blood and tongue sticking out. My siblings probably figured that if mistletoes, stockings and ornaments were meant to be hanged, why not a person with a death sentence? At the way our neighbors reacted to our Hangman Lantern (morbid!!!) , we could say that the "execution" of our parol was outstanding! The next year, we reprised the "hanging" parol idea using E.T.!
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| 1983, E.T. LANTERN |
OUR PAROL GOES EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL.Christmas 1983. Had the Pope seen our parol hanging in the front of our house in 1983, he would have excommunicated us. Even my poor Mother was mortified, and begged us to take our “parol” down. Our neighbors along the street would whisper about those “Castro kiddie weirdos”. We didn’t mind; on the contrary, we thought our lantern was uniquely cute! It was 1983, and the worldwide hit movie "E.T. The Extraterrestrial" had just been shown in Philippine cinemas. And we were hooked on the adorable alien. We thought E.T. would make a better, moe engaging lantern than the very common star parol. Both aliens and stars are from outer space anyway. Why, even Manila C.O.D. had space-themed Christmas displays! So, my brothers fashioned a papier mache E.T. mask, which was put on a body, complete with feet in rubber shoes and boxing gloves (the hand with individual fingers was too laborious to make in papier mache). Since we couldn’t make our E.T. lanterns stand on our roof landing-we hanged it by the neck. When we lit up our E.T. lantern in December, our neighbors stood transfixed, but mostly in shock, with eyebrows raised. Our house was the cynosure of attention that Christmas of 1983. Looking back now, our E.T. parol was, indeed, in such bad taste, fit more for Halloween than Christmas. But we succeeded in what we set out to do: to make our Christmas decoration the most talked about in the neighborhood. If KMJS had only been around in 1983, Jessica Soho would have phoned us home, and featured our E.T.parol on her show!!
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