Really, I don’t care if it’s true or not.
If you give me a pill and it’s all placebo, so what? Thank God for sparing my liver and my kidneys. If it makes me well, then all is well, unless my sickness, too, is a conspiracy and what you want out of those jagged little pills is to keep me spending my money to fake-cure my fake disease. That’s a different thing altogether. It's like our taxes. We pay for benefits we don’t enjoy and that’s to our politician’s benefit.
But Santa Claus or the tooth fairy or Jack Frost or making sure we wet our lower extremities first—first the toes, then the feet, then the lower legs, then the thighs, and so on and so forth—when we shower in the morning! Or the fortune cookie. Or feng shui, especially if all it takes is to wear a certain color on a particular day or to move the furniture around to change our luck from bad to good or from good to better. To all these things, I say why not? Unless the feng shui guru demands that you buy ₱50,000 worth of trinkets to align yourself with the forces of the universe. Or if Santa Claus insists you make a ₱500,000 deposit to get him “to hurry down the (inexistent) chimney tonight.”
When my niece told me, some time when she was six, that her classmates were saying that there was no Santa Claus or that the real Santa Claus was really their parents, I told her nonchalantly that “if you don’t believe in magic, that’s okay, but that’s like doing away with 50 percent of the joys of life.” I’m not sure if I ever truly believed in Santa Claus, but I’ve always considered myself a believer in the good, whether the angels or the saints or Santa’s elves. I remember that I kind of felt resentful toward "”I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” because it reinforced my doubts, like someone spoiled the surprise, revealing the mystery in the Christmas box before I got to unwrap it.
But no thanks, I remain none the wiser. When I planned to do a fashion shoot in the woods of Marinduque, the villagers only but briefly hesitated to warn me that it was inhabited by elementals, maligno (evil spirits), I think, or diwata (fairies). But I was shooting with then Asia’s Next Top Model’s Stephanie Retuya, and we had gone that far, having traveled to Marinduque on a roll-on, roll-off cargo ship, so I soldiered on, even if I had my two nieces with me, the older of whom was only seven and her younger sister was four, and both were participating in our fashion take on
“Our Lady in the Woods,” with little imps to keep her company.
The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper. ―W.B. Yeats
The thing is I also believe in science, though I doubt that science can explain everything. Highly advanced as it is, and advancing ever more rapidly, having launched satellites to the far reaches of space (but never far enough to solve the mysteries of the universe), ours is a science only at its developmental stages. Has science disproved the existence of the soul, which to me is as vast as the universe? If it has, I don’t believe it. Just as, to this day, if I do get something special for Christmas, whether or not I can attribute it to someone, even to myself for being nice, less naughty, all year round, I express the sentiment of gratitude not exactly to Santa Claus but to the generosity of the invisible gift giver he was made to embody.
And, against my better judgment as a journalist mandated to share only things based on verifiable facts, even if just loosely, I will not ply you here with details and proofs and pieces of evidence, but a big part of my life is magic, inexplicable, maybe even unknowable. That I am alive is magic. This life of mine is a mystery that unfolds day after day. I have no doubt, however, that to the very last of my breath on earth, much of it will remain a mystery. I have to be above human, beyond human, above me, beyond me, which is to say, I have to return to my original state, to see the complete picture, if I even have to see it rather than just becoming a part of it again, that infinite vastness that is just magic.
I have no doubt that the truth behind us is inconceivable, unexplainable, beyond comprehension. It’s not even magic, magic is something we can conjure up as humans, but I guess my faith is that if I believe it, it must be true.
So maybe there is no proof there really is Christmas, let alone Santa Claus, but yes, even here, it’s the thought that counts, as long as it is wrapped in magic, in those things that tug at our heartstrings and our soulstrings for reasons we don’t completely understand. I still believe in Christmas that makes us want to be good people, that makes us want to “let (y)our heart be light,” that makes us remember that “happy feeling nothing in this world can buy.”
I’m glad I’m a believer in magic, though it might seem silly (or primitive) from a more scientific, more practical, more sophisticated standpoint. If science can prove it all wrong, I guess I’d rather be wrong, so I can at least enjoy the most magical season of the year.