A mountain blessing for Sid

A hundred Igorot women climbed the mountain carrying rice and homemade peanut butter to bless my six-month-old son. Twenty chickens were sacrificed. A witch doctor in a rooster-claw necklace and yellow flip-flops held Sid up and gave him a name: Tiyang, light of the house. I took my baby to the Cordillera mountains of the Philippines, to the 2,000-year-old rice terraces where his father's family have always lived, and wrote about it for Condé Nast Traveller's best family holidays. He's a child who very nearly didn't come to be. Now he knows as many Tagalog words as English ones, and he is the light of my house.

Ellie Fazan wrote about her son’s mountain blessing in the Philippines for Condé Nast Traveller, published as the essay in the family edition, April 2026.