How will we celebrate Christmas this year?

Our family celebration of Christmas will be a mix having lived in London for 20 years in exile. While there we carried on with some Filipino traditions but these have been subdued by our exile.

Christmases in London will always be memorable. Then our children were still children and looked forward to the festivities. So did I.

We could all bunch them in the car with their blankets and go around the city to see the Christmas lights. The center of these lights was in Oxford and Regent Street where we go to shop at Liberty’s and Hamley’s.

Like the Philippines, family reunions in the UK are de rigueur except that in the Philippines it includes the extended families whom you see only once a year.

While in London, the center of the family dinner is the turkey and for gourmets it has to be wild turkey which has a different taste from the commercial brands. I use the original book of Robert Carrier which has the recipe for Austrian stuffing. But the book has gone out of print and the one I used went out of print. The one I have for 20 Christmases is tattered with missing pages including the Austrian stuffing. I now do it from memory (faulty) but it is still delicious and a loved memory from Christmases in our London exile.

I live in an emptying nest, my husband is gone (has been since 2008) and one daughter, an architect who lives in London with a project in the poshest part of Cornwall, close to that lovely southern tip of the British isle.

We have kept the tradition of simbang gabi on the 24th if erratically sometimes we do, and sometimes we don’t both in Manila and London.

Filipinos in general do not question the beliefs and traditions they have been born into even after a long exile.

Having been a colony for so long we have a general passivity that has held us back from exploring ideas and changes that could have helped create a more aware and kind society. Part of that problem is the narrow perspective of the Roman Catholic religion that came with Spanish conquistadores. Religion may have been good for creating public order during the period of conquest promoting as it did obedience and docility with the threat of the fires of hell for those who had other things in mind. But times change. Today we are a nation forging our own identity in a complex and difficult world.

More than ever, Filipinos must learn to think for themselves, must learn to question when they are in doubt and cultivate the habit of curiosity and wonder. This is the gift of thought that this column offers to its readers this Christmas – to explore the firmament of their own hearts through respect and regard for other beliefs and traditions than what they have been used to both in their personal and public lives. The following quotations, both religious and irreligious, were culled and randomly selected in a day’s work among the books and articles that lay on my desk yesterday morning. Make what you can out of it.

One interpretation of the origins of Christmas is pagan. It is the time of the winter solstice. “The sun reaches its lowest point in its annual journey across our sky in the Northern Hemisphere. This happens around Dec. 21. Many celebrate this day as a ‘natural holiday’ an alternative to the religious feasts of this period, such as ‘Christmas.’ And for many this is also a time for gift giving and gathering together with friends and relatives.”

The Christian is about the birth of Jesus. From the Bible, Luke 1:78. “In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria. And everyone went to his own town to register.

“So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David because he belonged to the house and line of David. He went there to register with Mary who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.

“And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them and the glory of the Lord shone around them and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, ‘Do not be afraid, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David, a Savior has been born to you, he is Christ the Lord. This will be a sign to you. You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger. Suddenly, a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel praising God and saying, Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests.”

That gospel was upset yet again by The Dead Sea Scrolls. (Excerpted from a news article) “The Dead Sea Scrolls were a sensational discovery in the late 1940s but only a limited number of Filipinos had read of it or would ever realize its importance. It has now been finally published in full after years of controversy and scandal. It’s the greatest publication effort of the 20th century, said Jacob Fisch, executive director of the Friends of Israel Antiquities Authority.

“The scrolls, which have provided archaeological and religious scholars new ways of looking at the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish world of Jesus have been produced in 37 volumes by the Oxford University Press.”

The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947 in the Qumran caves near the Dead Sea by two Bedouin tribe shepherds. The scrolls are believed to have been written by a monastic group of religious people known as the Essenes who lived during the time of Jesus.

Before this great religious archaeological find the only existing records on the life of Jesus Christ were written by four Christian evangelists namely Luke, Mark, Matthew and John. The earliest of these so-called Gospels was written at least 50 years after the death of Jesus. Not one of them wrote the gospels during Jesus’ lifetime.”