All I want for Christmas is chicken macaroni, just simple elbow pasta, boneless chicken, and cheese, like cheddar, though I don’t mind Gruyere or Gouda or even Brie, just leave the rind out. No raisins, and please no broccoli, no spinach. I like the ritual of bedashing my salad with black pepper or cayenne pepper back in my pre-acid reflux days, and grating queso de bola over it.

Neither I nor my idea of a Christmas dinner is that simple. I grew up in a home where Christmas is a big deal. All my life, Noche Buena demands that every square inch of the dinner table, not to mention the kitchen counters, not to mention the fridge, is filled with food in bowls, on platters, on plates, and on chargers. My mother died in 2015, my father in 1989, but the tradition has stuck. It doesn’t matter if we have children in the house or if there is a lot of us in the house. When the clock strikes 12 on Christmas Eve, we should be at the table groaning under the weight of a literal feast, more food than we can finish in like three days, unless we are still around the Christmas tree unwrapping our gifts or playing parlor games, whose only goal is to win the cash prize and for everyone to win something.

I’ve only spent one Christmas away from this annual riot. It was when I whisked myself off with my friends to New York to check my dream of a cliché of spending New Year’s Eve at Times Square off my bucket list. I also spent Christmas Eve there in an apartment in mid-Manhattan, where the window opened up to a view of the Chrysler building lit up like a fantasy come true against the cold New York sky.

Unforgettable as it was, I remember rushing back on foot to the apartment from a Moroccan dinner to make it back in time for Noche Buena, but in my life, I never really run, so I was half an hour too late and, with a whole plate of cous cous and a lamb dish in my tummy I couldn’t for the life of me pretend to have any room for the adobo my friend cooked up to stand in for the lechon, embutido, pancit or Pinoy spaghetti, lumpia, and, yes, chicken macaroni that would have waited for me on the Noche Buena table had I been in Manila, instead of New York.

As a result, my friend was mad, but after a while, as I sat on the sofa thinking I was having the opposite of all my Christmases past, my friend emerged out of her icy-as-New York winter mood, coffee and chocolate cake in hand, and so we spent Christmas like that, young and happy with our coffee dreams and chocolate wishes in our never-tobe-forgotten New York moment.

Chicken macaroni to me is what Jose Mari Chan is to many others when September comes and Christmas is not far behind.

But back to chicken macaroni—In Manila, on Christmas Eve, I would partake of the festive dishes, but just enough of this and that because, to wrap up the meal, I would have the salad. I don’t know why I got hooked on chicken macaroni, but at some point, while I was growing up, my mom must have whipped up the perfect chicken macaroni, and I never forgot. It was not so much the salad I had on Christmas Eve, as it was what was left of it that my mom kept in the fridge for a day or two, so on Christmas Day—when everything had wound down, the Christmas gifts having been opened, the parlor games having all been played—and on Dec. 26 and even up to Dec. 27, I would be in and out of sleep and scooping out macaroni salad into a tiny bowl, with extra cheese to grate over it and a shaker to shower it with pepper as I tucked myself to these little meals on the dinner table whenever I was awake.

From then on, chicken macaroni, more than anything else, has been my Christmas staple, to be enjoyed more on the days following Christmas Eve until it runs out or it turns sour. As a grownup, the first bowl of chicken macaroni salad on Christmas morning is a sign that, at last, the stresses of the holidays are over and I can spend all day in my pajamas just watching reruns of Home Alone or Gremlins. After my mother died, I would be in the mood for it early, like in September, so I would ask my sister to whip up a big bowl of it to last me a few days. Chicken macaroni to me is what Jose Mari Chan is to many others when September comes and Christmas is not far behind, though of course there is nothing like chicken macaroni for Noche Buena.

This year, while we are potentially at the tailend of this devastating pandemic or—heaven forbid!—still in danger of yet another serious surge of infections should the much-feared Omicron variant make its way to the country, I think all I want for Christmas is chicken macaroni. With hope, it will make things feel right again, like when my mother was alive, like when I was young, like when the pandemic was only a figment of my sci-fi obsessions, like when my ideas of life, friendship, love, success, people, and dreams had yet to go through the wringer and change me forever.

I wish you a macaroni Christmas too.