For weeks during the holiday season, Yerba Buena Gardens in downtown San Francisco is colorfully adorned with Christmas lanterns. While they are beautiful decorations, they also serve as a nod to the neighborhood’s connection to the Filipino American community.
Jonny Roberts teaches parol making during San Francisco’s annual Parol Festival, which has been in the city for over 20 years. Roberts grew up in Minnesota, where he said the parol signaled much more than a Christmas decoration.
“Historically it was actually used to kind of signal to travelers, ‘Hey, this is a refuge you can come to,'” Roberts said, describing the parol lanterns.
Parol lanterns mean different things to different people, but they all start the same. The base is 10 bamboo sticks, five dowels and some rubber bands. After that, it’s up to the builder to decide how to make it their own.
“When I’m driving through Minnesota and I get to see a parol in someone’s house, it kind of has that same feeling,” Roberts said. “There’s kind of this sense of home or that kinship from far away. That’s the signal that’s being sent to me.”
To learn more, there’s an exhibit at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts that runs through Jan. 4, showcasing the roots of the Filipino American community in San Francisco.