Increasing ‘Christmas Typhoons’ Dampen Philippines Holiday Season

The Philippines is known for its monthslong Christmas celebrations starting in September. The heavily Catholic country of nearly 120 million people is serious about the festive season. However, this time of year has recently taken a much more somber tone for many Filipino families.

Estrella Pagarigan had decorated her home with recycled bamboo and plastic bottle parols for the holidays, but in early November, the house where she, her husband, and three children have lived for years was flattened overnight. Typhoon Yinxing, locally known as Marce, had brushed through the northern part of the Southeast Asian country and wreaked havoc in Pagarigan’s province of Cagayan. Their home—which had withstood previous natural disasters—was one of more than a thousand that was razed in the administrative region.

“It was exceptional,” Pagarigan tells TIME of the Category 4-equivalent storm. Christmas certainly won’t be as merry, she said.

Such so-called super typhoons are becoming more and more common for the Philippines, exacerbated by climate change. The country faces an average of 20 tropical cyclones per year, according to the national weather bureau. It is part of the Pacific Typhoon Belt, and has an active typhoon season that normally runs from July to October, when 70% of the year’s typhoons form. But increasingly, the holiday season—which is usually associated with dryer temperatures—is seeing strong typhoons too, like in 2021, when Super Typhoon Rai (a Category-5 equivalent) came in early December and caused nearly $1 billion in damages.

2024 has been relentless: in less than a month between October and November, six tropical cyclones—including Marce—entered the country, affecting millions across the archipelago and causing over $350 million in damages to infrastructure and agriculture. In the wake of the onslaught, the Office of the President urged government workers to avoid lavish holiday gatherings, “adopt austerity in their celebrations,”…