The nights that launched a thousand sheep

Call me Ebenezer, call me McDuck (Yes, think Scrooge); but try as I might to deny or ignore it, there’s just something missing from the Christmas and New Years of today. And it’s not just the child in me that’s gone missing (with matching milk carton image), or the oft-repeated phrase that the yuletide season is really for the kids and so why should I expect anything else. For some inexplicable reason, everyone "at home" is down with the flu as I write this; from myself (red-eyed and red-nosed, and feeling very "Rudolph"), to nephews and nieces, to adult family members who have flown in from Europe or the States. And if I didn’t know better, I’d suspect even old Saint Nick and the spirits of Christmas present and future have caught the bug as well, and are on enforced "bedrest with lots of fluids," counting sheep, while we’re embroiled in traffic snarls and congested airport queues.

What’s happened? Well for one thing, par for the course in this day and age of the "almighty marketing pitch," the essence of our holidays, their significance, have taken a back seat to the more commercial possibilities that abound whenever gift-giving and spending can be actively encouraged. Whether it’s aimed at making one spend so-called quality time with the family, friends or that dear significant other; a myriad of opportunistic products, establishments and services are all there, making their claim on our sense of "It’s better to give than to receive." Whether it’s a new boutique hotel in Bora, Phuket or Bali enticing you to stay between Christmas and the New Year, a computerized robot that’s the current rage, that X Box 360 or the T Mac 5 that is your child’s pricey "must have," the latest i-Pod or cellphone model, or the ultra modern, ultra painless fat-dissolving laser treatment – the purchase, the commercial transaction, the parting of us and our hard-earned cash has become the driven purpose, as monumental as the parting of the Red Sea.

Look around us and tell me it isn’t so. And mind you, this pushing of the "real" significance of the holiday to the back burner is not just limited to Christmas and the New Year. Think of Holy Week and All Souls Day! Now, it’s just Holy Week equals our version of Spring Break in extremis, and All Souls Day is the Halloween long weekend! When rave party organizers and events management teams pull out their red felt markers and encircle those holiday periods as fertile ground for ever-flowing booze-laden nights with heart thumping, wired to the gills, electronica blaring from the porous walls, you can say a loud goodbye, Adios and Bonsoir to remembering details like the Last Supper on Thursday, the 3 p.m. Good Friday Crucifixion and why Black Saturday has nothing to do with your outfit. Does anyone even know the difference between All Saints and All Souls Days, or the origins of All Hallows Eve? Holy and consecrated they may have been, but nowadays, it’s just the (il)legitimate excuse for one long party.

Mind you, am not that much of a drip that I’d outlaw the partying; just find it both sad and instructional to notice how things have really gone awry as we enter the sixth year of this 21st century of ours. We talk about the dearth of values in government, in education, in the way business and commerce is conducted and on the family front – but can all that dearth be a surprise given how easily, like lamb (hmmm, that image of sheep again!) being led to slaughter, we sublimate the true reasons these holidays exist in the first place. They’re all held hostage to THAT product launch, THAT exercise in brand-imaging or sustaining equity. May be a lot to ask, but I still think that with enough responsibility and clear-headed thinking, these more commercial considerations and the true reasons can co-exist. It won’t be easy, but we have examples like the efforts of Bono and Live Aid to demonstrate how such merging can still be accomplished in this day and age.

Am certain you all have your own favorite paean to our idiosyncratic Filipino Christmas and New Year. Like how we’d be the world’s best enviromentalists and garbage disposal experts if we could apply the same recycling talents that we possess in abundance for gift ideas and giving (and re-giving). Or how we’ll gorge on lechon, queso de bola, chocolate and ensaymada, noche buena, bibingka and puto bumbong, and yet feel good and justified, because we’ll wash it all down with Diet-Coke. Go figure why we bother! And of course, the very worse thing to be, on New Year’s Eve, is a pet dog – all you do is bark and whine the whole night, and get stuffed into some dank, airless room as your master will be making sure you don’t inhale the smoke and phosphorus that lay over the city till the early morning of January 1st. Plus sniffing around and doing your ceremonias that first week of January is fraught with danger, as you just might ingest that unspent watusi or sparkler debris.

These were the nights that launched a thousand sheep – whether the sheep may be us, as submissive subjects to the commercialization of these holidays; or the sheep I was personally counting while nodding off and wishing there was more substance than style in this hurly burly world of ours. Maybe I really am just a dyed-in-the-wool cynical so-and-so, more Humbug than Hambog. And while I’m figuring that one out (or sleeping it off), I wish you all the best for the new year to come.