It is not hard to feel that Christmas is near when you are in the Philippines. Everywhere, you see these christmas decorations that Filipinos call “parol”. It is a star-shaped colorful Christmas lantern made of cellophane paper, japanese paper, and a local material called capiz. Most of them come with colorful moving lights. They’re really beautiful. I think the parol is unique in the Philippines.
I passed by a store of parol last night. It has a display of I think more than 100 parol all of them with their beautiful lights on. I wonder how much energy is consumed with that store in one night. It’s beautiful to see our street filled with the spirit of Christmas but it made me thought if we can still do that and saving on our electricity at the same time.
Along the Ayala Avenue, the main street of our place here in Makati, you’ll see a beautiful display of Christmas lights running through the plants at the center of the road. At night, the lights are a beautiful sight to hold. Even if traffic sucks, you won’t get pissed off because of the sight. It’s beautiful and I don’t have anything about beautiful things and things that are associated with Christmas but I’m just wondering if we can ever have a beautiful and energy-efficient Christmas decorations and Christmas lights?
I know that Christmas lights that are made of LED (Light Emitting Diodes) are more energy efficient than the regular incandescent Christmas lights. But can we find LED Christmas lights here in the Philippines? Is there any shop here that sells LED Christmas lights?
We don’t have any Christmas decorations in our place but if you have a parol and Christmas lights in your house, maybe one energy saving tip is to turn it off before you go to sleep. It doesn’t just save energy, it’s also safe for the whole household. I heard a lot of incidents here in Manila where the house was burned because of defective Christmas lights left turned on the whole night. I think if all houses that have Christmas lights and parol in their houses turn them off at 12am, we’ll save a lot of electricity already.
This may also be the right time to change all our incandescent bulbs if you still have one in your house. Incandescent bulbs require a lot of electricity. Besides, they make our rooms hotter. This holiday season is our time to give gifts to our godchildren and nephews and nieces. We can make this holiday extra special by giving a gift to our planet: buying fluorescent lights.
These are only two things and they’re really simple but they can make a lot of difference. We’ll be saving on our electricity. The electricity we use up means less energy usage which means the less natural resources consumed which means less woe for the planet earth.
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