When visiting Ditta Sandico at home anytime of the year, one can expect a most beautiful setting, she being an artist of high calibre, well known for her beautiful and unique fashion creations, mostly iconic wrap-arounds made of banaca fabric.

Although designing beautiful wraps is her forte, the Christmas season always allows Ditta, a University of the Philippines Fine Arts major in Advertising graduate, the chance to give vent to her wide-ranging creativity.

This time of the year, she created in the Sandico ancestral home in New Manila, built in 1949, a Christmas setting that highlights Philippine indigenous weaves that Ditta has perfected, and which she incorporates into universal holiday traditions. The result is a new twist or flavor to the usual holiday trimmings that the Sandicos have kept through the years.

Mommy Corazon by Alcuaz
A few days ago, the Daily Tribune lifestyle duo of Spaces editor Francine Medina-Marquez and yours truly, along with photographer Joey Mendoza, visited Ditta who graciously toured us around the family home.

A typically sprawling New Manila home, the Sandicos' is splendid for its wide space, high ceiling, wide narra wall panel and equally wide narra planks for the floor, and the profusion of antique furniture. An Alcuaz portrait of Mommy Corazon in her younger days holds court, as it were, in the living room, a testimony to her beauty and aristocratic bearing.

Both mother and daughter are so amiable and engaging that a visitor immediately relaxes in their presence. Mommy, who attended Assumption Convent, is in her 90s. She shared her nostalgia stories. "I had my debut here," she related. "I did not learn how to cook. I finished my degree in commerce at the University of Santo Tomas because I knew I was going to work." She spent many fruitful years at the family-owned COD Department Store in Cubao, Quezon City.

A female Christmas tree
On another side of the living room, an antique belen, complete from Joseph, Mary and the infant Jesus, to the shepherds and the sheep, donkey and the Three Kings' camels, all meek and calm, face The Redeemer in deep adoration. The manger is all lit up, reminding its beholder of the family's famous COD parents and children as well as gangmates watched on Christmas evenings a spectacular animated Nativity tableaux.

In a pivotal corner that marks an imaginary boundary between the sala and the glass-encased lanai is a Christmas tree festooned with trimmings made of Philippine indigenous materials.

A surprise for the observant is the tree's depiction of a woman from the headdress at the top to the slippers at the base. Here is Ditta in her playful mood sure to elicit smiles and squeals of delight. Of course, the imaginary lady dons a Ditta Sandico wrap-around which, of course, defines her femininity. If there is any message the tree wants to convey, it is that this is a place for women of style, elegance and grace. Like Ditta and her mom Corazon, the Christmas tree does not call attention to itself, and yet when one observes her closely, pockets of wonder become more visible and you know you are in front of someone special.

Banaca collages and Vigan empanada
Ditta showed us her art gallery in a corner of the spacious garden. On its walls are collages made of banaca proving once again the versatility of this fabric made especially for Ditta by the Mangyans of Mindoro, a tribe she has known since her younger years when she and her cowboy kind of a father "roughed it up" and explored the mountains and hinterlands of this island.

Come dinner time, the round table in the lanai turned into a feast of Vigan specialties including pancit miki sopas, tender bagnet with crispy skin, garlicky zero fat longganisa and, to cap it off, a crunchy Vigan empanada that is not only delicious but, I must say here, fresh and immaculate, a far cry from the commercial version that obviously has been drowned in overused cooking oil. Sweet watermelon cubes capped the night, followed by a bag of longganisa for Francine and a meaningful card for me which, Ditta assured me, "is a token of our concern for your health and well-being." All I could think of is this lady sure knows how to manifest what she keeps close to her heart. No wonder her career has grown and her shop has endured through the proverbial good times and bad including the pandemic when she and our dear friend Raymond Villanueva started a lifestyle vlog.

These days, Ditta is preparing for an exhibit at the National Museum.

Before we left, Mommy Corazon arrived from an anticipated misa de gallo. When I asked to touch her hand on my forehead, she obliged me but very softly added, "But that is not enough," and proceeded to draw with her thumb a tiny cross on my forehead, while whispering, "God bless you, Jojo."