Christmas, a moveable feast

The Christmas season brings joy and noise. Carols permeate the air – from what disk jockeys are spinning from their cubicles to out-of-tune “jingle beels, jingol beels…” barked  by kids in the neighborhood, in their hands an open  box for “donations.”

Yuletide  revives happy memories of Christmases past. Christmas being a happy nearly a month  event, it can be moved from one to many months, and associated with other cherished experiences. For Christmas  is a moveable feast.?

My recollections of Christmas include our three years in Masbate when I was a kid. I could still hear and feel the rattling of our rusty  post-war jeep carrying families to the homes of church members  to sing carols as a fund-raising activity.

Then there was Mama’s major production – her conduction of Handel’s Messiah, with young men and women singing without a single musical instrument for  accompaniment. I felt a bit jealous, though, when my younger brother, Warto, not me, was chosen to do a solo of the song “There’s a song in their air…” before the Handel chorus. Had I gotten the role, it would have put to an end my previous assignments of being the Virgin Mary, carrying a doll (gender-free, I guess), of the baby Jesus which Mama had bought for the nativity tableau,  but promptly kept  inside her aparador so it would be saved from wear and tear for the next year’s reenactment.

Mama was proud of the fact that her aunts appeared in church that night, even as they were  constantly making the sign of the cross as they had been told that entering a Protestant church was a sin. After the cantata, Mama thanked them. “See, nothing bad happened to you while you were inside the church.” The  old ladies smiled. It was a triumph for Mama who had several devotions and  was the choir’s soloist  in the Catholic church in Milagros, her hometown, before she converted to Protestant.

Warto became an art lecturer at Lyceum, Manila, a choreographer and dancer, a creative artist who makes beautiful Christmas trees and lanterns out of sea shells and seeds (palay, pili,  corn cobs) and soda bottle caps. He is now retired with his painter wife, Vee Geroso of  Bacolod, and they make beautiful music together in the most beautiful town on earth -- Gingoog City.

Christmas means moms, was my mantra. At one freshman  class in  college (yes, at Silliman, the best school in the land),  I heard the whirring of an airplane overhead, and I felt so homesick. I missed my mother so much. When I went home months later, I hugged this No. One Woman in my life  tightly, nestling against her sweet-smelling chest.  The next day, while playing “Stardust” on the piano, I stood up and  ran to her. “I love you, Ma.”  She had tears in her eyes, of joy. It was literally Christmas in that mother-and-daughter scene.

After suffering losses from an unsuccessful lumber dealing venture, Papa, a CPA, took the family to Mindanao, where he opened a printing press as well as engaged in selling fresh fish hauled into Mambitoon beaches by fishermen. I remember the evenings my siblings and I ran Christmas cards through small mounds of gold powder. We’d have Coke and sandwiches Mama prepared, but our  minds were directed at the few pesos Papa would pay us for our effort.

I loved making Christmas trees in school. Hordes of us students went to the beach to cut down mangrove trees (a no-no today) and dragged them through the streets to school.  The boys  would shear off the  leaves,  then  we girls took over, winding  strips of white Japanese paper around the bare branches. We placed cotton balls on the branches, to simulate snow.

The family coffers were half empty the Christmas I was  15. But surprise, surprise,  that year,  all of us seven kids, including the baby, had gifts under the tree – from our parents who during the year, scrimped and saved on daily necessities.  I was so happy about my light yellow T-shirt that  fitted me so nicely. A best Christmas that was.

But Christmas is a moveable feast. Each time I had a good time felt like Christmas. Like when one day, when  I was a sophomore in college, I found  a package waiting for me at my study table. Lo and bold, inside the box were two beautiful dresses Mama had sewn, and a pair of black shoes. How Mama had saved, for the gifts. I felt it was Christmas.

Christmas was when I received a gift from my brother, Hermaneli who was in college two years ahead of me. It was a bar of fragrant soap. Oh how I loved my manong for remembering me on my birthday. It was Christmas in August, my birth month.

It felt like  Christmas when the late United Church of Christ in the Philippines General Secretary Enrique Sobrepeña called me in the office if I wanted to study abroad. Of course, I said; the good old bishop must have heard my heart pounding on the telephone.  And that was how I got to study at  the Medill School of Journalism in Evanston, Ill. on scholarship.

What a joyous day it was when after graduation, I was quickly accepted as a feature writer in the Manila Bulletin. I became famous in my schools – a Brenda Starr, they said. Shy and modest then, I would laugh and say, “I’m just lucky.”

It was Christmas for Papa one day as we were walking towards a bus stop from the Manila Bulletin. We were talking about my brother Hermaneli’s being accepted to enroll at the UE Medical Memorial Center.  I told Papa  I was going to give Nell his monthly allowance. He looked at me and pressed my hand.  He looked so happy that I  made such an offer.  I would remember the sparkle in his eyes. It was my way of sharing my fortune of being accepted to work in the most popular newspaper at the time.

It  was nine days after Christmas of 1973 when I gave birth to my one and only son, Andoy. He came four long years after I got married. I’d look at him sleeping, so handsome and fair and long, wash his garments with TLC.  He grew up to be smiling most of the time, he was so active, running to and fro, I said, when will you ever stop for a while? He would, while seated at the john, reading his Chinese comic book  and Tintin. Andoy is one of God’s best gifts for me, and so is Andoy’s only son, Santi, age 13,  who calls me Mamu.

Another baby came one Christmas morning when my cousin gave birth and allowed me to take care of Oliver Alfonso Estella as she was going abroad. Ponpon  took all my attention and filled with joy the vacuum in my heart when  someone close to me died.

I had nice times chatting with the late publisher of The Philippine STAR, Betty Go-Belmonte.  I had lunch in her house, we sat beside each other in church, and she asked me to join The Philippine STAR after I quit my job due to pressures from the powers-that-be  especially towards the end of the dictatorial regime. What I can’t forget was the time  she was sick, and  I dropped  a dried flower arrangement I made at her house on my way to church.  After a few minutes,  her husband Sonny ran after me, and said  Betty told  him not to forget  to thank me for the flowers. The message brought tears to my eyes. It was so Betty, so generous and caring,  and made me, and I am sure many people,  feel that every day was  Christmas.

Christmas always brings nice feelings.

May your days be merry this Christmas,  and Christmas feelings be with you all year round.

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