The majority of people in the Philippines yearn for a happy Christmas this year, even after the country experienced a powerful earthquake and the deadliest typhoon in its history, according to a national survey appeared on Wednesday.

A survey in the fourth quarter of 2013 by Social Weather Stations, a major research institution in the Philippines, showed 62 percent of people nationwide expect a happy Christmas, which was 2 percent lower than that in the fourth quarters of 2011 and 2012.

Meanwhile, 9 percent expect it to be sad and 28 percent said it would be neither happy nor sad, the survey said.

In Visayas, a place devastated by 7.1 magnitude earthquake in October and the super typhoon Haiyan, or locally known as Yolanda in November, the expectation of a happy Christmas declined to a record-low of 57 percent in 2013, 9 percent lower than the figure of last year, while the expectation of a sad Christmas reached record-high of 11 percent from 7 percent in 2012.

The survey showed that the southern island of Mindanao enjoyed the highest expectation of a happy Christmas this year with 77 percent, compared with 61 percent in Luzon region, 57 percent in Visayas and 47 percent in the National Capital Region (NCR) of Metro Manila.