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Christmas Seasons and Memories

Despite no longer identifying as a Catholic, Christmas remains my favourite season. It usually means reconnecting with family like all the other holidays, it also often means visiting the provinces to greet relatives from far away Merry Christmas!

The season would start early in comparison to the West. Remember the Mariah Carey "she's thawing" memes? Yeah good luck SCP, we have Jose Mari Chan who has thawed two months early in September every year. I can promise you, I've spent Octobers roaming a spookily decorated National Bookstore while also hearing Christmas jingles. Despite my father's griping and complaints, I loved hearing that. It was nice to associate my birth month with Christmas since Halloween brought its own monsters and scars to me.

Even my asthma which gets triggered during the Christmas season wasn't enough to dampen my mood. As far as I'm concerned, it was a fantastic season, and I felt things would be okay for a little bit.

Our Christmas tree would be brought down on November with all of us helping decorate it. It was a smallish tree we’d have to put on a table to get some height and it’s old and leaning to one side but it has so much memory to us. Our belen, the nativity scene, was this old thing too. We had to glue all the figures on the scene but two have stopped attaching to the floor of the barn and the angel keeps falling off. Then came the tinsel (we saved some green tinsel to use for grass in the belen) and then the Christmas lights that played carols in a tinny sounding way. I remember that some of our Christmas balls bounced too which delighted little me. Sometimes we’d watch Christmas movies like the Santa Clause or something.

Then we also have simbang gabi, the midnight mass. We’d wake up so early to be dragged off to church on very cold mornings. It’s customary and it happens during advent. But the thing was, we were allowed to stay in the car if we’re too sleepy or my mom would bribe us with street food stalls like kwek-kwek or Japanese pancakes. After mass though, my mom would buy us puto bumbong to share along with some bibingka. 

I remember the stress of childhood when my mother used to bring us to the mall but distract my sisters and me by sending us off to the distant parts of the mall where we won't see her or my dad buying us our gifts or the all-day preparations for Noche Buena done by my late grandfather and mother where we would have to wait all day before we held our Christmas (kinda Christmas Eve) dinner as a feast with our neighbours. Of course, attending mass on Christmas Eve is also a big part of this. We don’t really pay attention but a nativity play is done every year and the church inside would be packed with people. Sometimes to the point that we’d be at the ukay-ukay store in front of our church. Throughout it all, stalls upon stalls of vendors for foods or toys or drinks would be stationed around church. (I always succumb and buy the pink popcorn if ther vendor’s there, if not we have the Manong who had been selling siomai by the church since I was little, if not well, kwek-kwek had always been a favourite.) Bringing home puto bumbong and bibingka is always a must, of course. 

Karaoke was a must, and the older men would be seen getting drunk while we children played street games or talked about inconsequential things.

Those Christmases were good, we would sometimes be lucky enough to have lechon but even if we didn't, good food and family were enough to make Christmas good. A gift or two is also welcome, of course! Then come Christmas morning, our parents would wake us up, bundle us up (even though, unusually enough, Christmas mornings and Christmas day itself was relatively warm and not freezing like the days leading up to it) and get us into the family van (back when that old dinosaur was still a thing in the family) to make an hours-long drive to Bulacan where my paternal grandmother's side would be. There, we'd get our Aguinaldo (Christmas money) from older relatives like our titas and titos and grand-aunts and uncles. We would also have to eat at each house or we also get to bring home Noche Buena leftovers if we asked for them, we get to play with our cousins and also just catch up on family news. The next day, it's off to Cavite to visit my mom's side of the family.

As time went on though, our Christmases became humbler in many ways. Especially after our father quit his job claiming too many things at once. Christmas became a regular day for us by then. There were years where we don’t get gifts, others where our gifts could be pencil cases or wallets. My kind of Christmas gifts to my family was when I bought a bunch of books for my sisters and some things for my parents when I was working in BPO. After I quit because of my deteriorating mental health, we went back to these humble Christmases.

Tragic as it was, we didn’t go back to these Christmas spreads and gifts and revelry until after my mother passed. I don’t know how to take that but we began setting up our old traditions again but now without the bells and whistles. 

Christmas back then was this big event with gifts of toys or books and so much stuff but at the root of it all it always boiled down to us having many memories we won’t forget. Our experiences sculpted how we saw the holidays and the fact alone that we’ve come out of the hardest times of our lives and are still hoping for the best is a lot for us to say.

Maligayang Pasko at Manigong Bagong Taon!

(Merry Chrristmas and a Happy New Year!)