The Beloved Filipino Tradition That Started as a Government Policy

My mother and I spent an afternoon unfurling my lola’s apartment a few days after she died, back in 2017. In her closet, my grandmother had stored a big cardboard box with an address in Manila written on the side in thick marker. Inside the box were neatly arranged cans of food, bags of rice, drugstore makeup, and clothes she had bought on sale. Some of the items were labeled with our relatives’ names, and the package was left open in case anything else needed to be added as she went about her days.

Sending a filled-to-the-brim box to the Philippines each Christmas was a treasured routine my boxes, had started as an authoritarian regime’s effort to stem the Philippines’ in the 1970s.