The Spy in the Sandwich

Sunday, December 22, 2024

9:00 AM | All My Accidental Christmas Cheers

It is harder to feel Christmas when you’re older. The holidays harden into a mercenary plot that defies whatever magical understanding we used to have of it when we were children, when even the slightest Christmassy thing had the sheen of absolute joy and we were still given to believing that Santa Claus existed. Now, I am nearing 50 years old, alive for almost half a century already, and even I know—from what scraps of memory science I have read—to cast doubts whether the Christmases I remember when I was young were truly as joyful as I remember them to be. Or is this just nostalgia talking? I have learned since then that the memories we have are actually palimpsests of other memories of the same thing—and never the thing itself; in other words: ghosts upon ghosts piling together to create an image of the past that might not have been. I have not believed in Santa since I was ten; at near-fifty, I no longer believe in memories either.

Even then, an optimistic part of me still behold these memories as a kind of sacred ghost. How can I not? The ones that I have the sharpest recall of are taken from the years in my family’s life when we were poorest: for most of the 1980s we rented a ramshackle downstairs “apartment” of an old house somewhere in the bowels of Tubod, complete with an outhouse for a toilet—really what you would call a pit latrine; and “ramshackle” this apartment might have been, but somehow my mother and older brothers made into livable quarters through sheer ingenuity. [I say ingenuity because I’ve visited this apartment again only a couple of years ago for a documentary—and it is ghastly, and made me think: how were we able to live in this godforsaken place for quite a number of years?] And yet, this place is where most of my cherished Christmas memories are located.

I remember the night my brother Rocky came home from Cebu, and asked us kids to catch the shower of gold coins he flung to the air from a couple of bank pouches. We scrambled like mad, and with such joy, to collect what we could. [Those “gold” coins were newly-minted 25 centavo pieces, which at the time were just released as legal tender, dating this memory to 1983.]

I remember all the noche buenas we’ve had in that apartment, which was always swarming with friends and visitors. Those noche buenas must have been very simple—but for a kid not used to a regular feast, a Tupperware full of spaghetti [or chicken salad, which was my brother Rey’s specialty], a ham gifted by some friend, and plentiful rice must have been the very vision of wealth.

I remember my brother Edwin buying us our first Christmas tree. This was already in a time, perhaps around 1988, when we could finally breathe a little easy finances-wise, but that trek with my mother and my brother to Nijosa, and choosing just the one perfect plastic Christmas fir tree for the family to enjoy, and choosing the tinsels and decorations and lights to go with it—finally signaled to my boyhood consciousness that perhaps our fortunes have changed, and perhaps we did not have to go hungry anymore. After all, we just bought a Christmas tree!

I’m sure these memories are real. My remembrances of them may be palimpsests—but I am also aware that these memories are what makes me a human uniquely myself. Largely jaded I may have become, but these memories serve a purpose of reminding me I was once a boy full of Christmas brightness [that kid catching those gold coins], and fulfillment [that kid sated with simple noche buena], and hope [that kid happy with his new Christmas tree]. After all these years, these memories are still the kindling that sparks some joy in me come Christmas time, although the sparks have been muted by time and the joy blunted by the very adult reality of the withering world around us.

Christmas is really for children, no?

Christmas for adults is dancing unwillingly in a program for an office party.

Christmas for adults is all the utang paid after getting your 13th-month pay.

Christmas for adults is fretting over all kinds of holiday anxieties—the gifts to give, the parties to attend, the cards to send out.

In adulthood, I know I’ve tried my best to hang on to the magic of Christmas. I would attend the family Christmas dinners on the eve of the celebrations—although of late they have become obligations rather than a source of joy; I would listen to a personal playlist of Christmas songs that constituted mostly the Christmas albums released by The Carpenters—although admittedly I would play these songs mostly in July [don’t ask why]; I would foment new Christmas rituals, like watching annually a bunch of movies that made me feel Christmas joy—among them, Home Alone and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, A Charlie Brown Christmas, When Harry Met Sally..., and It’s a Wonderful Life, but I have not actually done this since the pandemic. One time, to make the family Christmas dinner more personal, I attempted to make curated and handmade gifts for everyone—which was something completely out of the blue because my family never give each other Christmas gifts. The effect I was going for did not come to fruition, so I never did it again. I think it was that one Christmas that I finally grew up and told myself to stop trying too hard.

That realization of not trying too hard has been a gift. Because these days, I find Christmas joy in the accidental things. Like, one time, I was in Manila in early December and just happened to wander into a park somewhere in Makati—and right at that moment, a cascade of brilliant lights suddenly covered everything. It felt truly magical, because unexpected.

Or that time we were navigating holiday traffic from Cebu to Dumaguete, and we were trapped waiting for the next ferry to take us from Bato to Tampi, and while we waited in the light of stars of early evening, a bunch of folk singers sang daygon—or traditional Christmas songs in Binisaya—to us. That felt like a blessing.

Or this year, when all thoughts of celebrating Christmas was erased by the specter of a semester ending in December. While other people thought of parties and gifts, my only focus was on completing students’ requirements and grading—a backbreaking effort that nullified any kind of holiday cheer. But I hastily accepted some intimate Christmas dinners—and they have been lovely. A soothing balm for a harried soul, a reminder that we are still human despite our anxieties and expectations.

Once this very same December, on a particularly fretful day, Renz took me to dinner at Meltin’ Pot, at their new branch along Hibbard Avenue. He wanted to eat ramen, and I wanted sushi. Out of the blue, while we were waiting for our food to arrive, a youth group came in, asked permission to serenade all of us in the premises with Christmas songs [for a “donation,” of course], and proceeded to give us a number of songs of high octane holiday cheer. That made me smile.

This is me wishing everyone—cheerful child or jaded adult—the best of Christmas cheer, accidental or not.