Eighth day after Christmas

Today is the eighth day of Christmas. The song about the twelve days of Christmas is no longer applicable in our times. The Vatican has made the Feast of the Epiphany a movable feast.

It used to be celebrated on the 6th of January. Now, it is commemorated on the first Sunday of January that does not coincide with the New Year. When that happens, the Feast of the Three Kings is observed in the 2nd Sunday of January and the days after Christmas is extended to thirteen days. This year, the Feast of the Three Kings will be January 5. There will be only eleven days after Christmas.

There could have been only one reason why the Vatican made the Feast of the Epiphany coincide with a Sunday and that is to cut down the number of holydays.

For people of my generation, the Feast of the Three Kings was the highlight of the Christmas celebration for that is when we received our Christmas gifts, not from Santa Claus, but from the Wise Men from the East. The only thing we had to do was to leave some grass for their camels.

Santa Claus was an American commercial innovation. It was on the eighth day after Christmas that the Japanese invaders entered and occupied the city of Manila after Gen. Douglas McArthur had declared it an open city. That occupation ended with Manila becoming the second most devastated city in World War II and the Philippine was the sixth most ravaged country. Despite that, we were able to maintain our old states of being the most economically advanced nation in Asia, next only to Japan.

Then President Ferdinand E. Marcos staged his coup d’etat. (Here we use the term coup d’etat in the correct sense of the meaning a state stroke or drastic measure taken by a government to forestall a supposed danger to the state. Nowadays, it is commonly used to mean a blow against an existing regime.)

It was the biggest setback in our history. By the time People’s Power overthrew the Marcos dictatorship, the Philippines had been reduced to the second poorest Asian country next to Bangladesh. It is very clear that historically, the Marcos regime did the country even greater harm than the Japanese occupation. Yamashita was executed for the abuses the Japanese army committed in the Philippines.

In the case of Marcos, the country has not even recovered the money he has stolen. They say that justice delayed is justice denied. Here justice is not only delayed and denied. Injustice is glorified.

Ninoy Aquino was shot. The soldiers who escorted him down the plane have been jailed for his assassination. But the person who gave the orders to have him executed has never been identified. Only small people go to jail. Big-time operators are above the law. The law must be implemented impartially. So long as a double standard of justice exists, there is no real justice.