Christmas is a writer’s festival. If I were to write down words associated with Christmas with no context at all, just list them down, I’m pretty sure they will be quite a delight on the ear, melodic and heartstirring and memory-inducing with words like December or carols or carolers, though I don’t always appreciate them singing in front of my house every five minutes.
Christmas wreaths and silver bells and the star of Bethlehem, the nouns are as cozy as cinnamon in your cup of hot chocolate. Even Scrooge sounds so Christmassy. The verbs make your soul sing—rejoice, jingle all the way, be merry, sparkle and shine, hurry down the chimney tonight.
I guess these words are why I have such high expectations of Christmas and, though there are occasions I feel disappointed, over all I’d like to think that my Christmases past and present have been warm and fuzzy. I’m at a point in my life when I think my future Christmases will be more or less the same.
The 1984 movie Gremlins is like the ultimate Christmas movie for me, aside from Home Alone, because, although it is a horror film, with people dying, windows being smashed, hopes being crushed, it’s still a winter wonderland, “where treetops glistened and…” yes, “children listened,” if only for their lives, in case there are Gremlins in the room.
Particularly terrifying was the story of the Phoebe Cates’ character in the movie, whose father was found dead in a chimney bearing his gifts for the family in his Santa Claus getup, white beard and all. But I believe she retold that sad tale of her childhood Christmas while strings of colorful lights were ablaze around a Christmas tree behind her.
Gremlins was a metaphor for the season that’s meant to be “the most wonderful time of the year,” and yet it is also breakup season, it is also heartbreak season. The brokenhearted are among us spreading cheer, giving gifts of hope and love that they themselves need so desperately.
Joy to the world we say and some of us find the joy the others give out short or put on, and so it is also a time relationships are strained to a breaking point. The gifts under the tree do not always evoke gratitude, sometimes they become a symbol of how much or how little we are regarded by the giver. It’s not the gift, they say, it’s the thought that counts, so how does a red shirt for a gift count for a recipient who hates the color red, especially if it comes from someone special, someone who claims to care?
Oh but loneliness at Christmas is also a thing of poignant, moving beauty, at least in a Filipino movie like 1982’s Gaano Kadalas ang Minsan, starring Vilma Santos, Hilda Koronel, and the late Dindo Fernando, in which there was a prolonged scene of the character Vilma Santos played all alone at Christmas in a series of Inno Sotto frocks, looking out the veranda in what appeared to be a Forbes Park or Dasmariñas Village home at a children choir singing Christmas carols. There were parols bright as stars and a Christmas tree aflame with starlight in the background too and, in my imagination, a Noche Buena table for one.
Christmas in the Philippines holds the record of being the longest celebration in the world, heralded on the dot in September by the Christmas songs made popular by Jose Mari Chan. It’s almost a joke, but it’s true and sometimes I think this prolonged celebration robs us of the true enchantment of Christmas. After all, it takes too much energy to celebrate that long and I cannot stand a months-long loop of “Christmas in Our Hearts.”
So it’s when a song I hardly hear like Ryan Cayabyab’s Christmas song “Kumukutikutitap” plays that my heart skips a beat, taking me back, taking me somewhere else. And the words are beautiful too, igniting memories in my brain— “Kumukutikutitap, bumubusibusilak / Ganyan ang indak ng mga bumbilya / Kikindat-kindat, kukurap-kurap / Pinaglalaruan inyong mga mata.”
I used to also love Chryssie Hynde’s rendition of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” and I still do, but for some reason it no longer stirs in me the same emotions I used to feel when I heard it at Christmastime in high school because I guess at this age I’m no longer as innocent, believing that “from now on, our troubles will be out of sight…” I used to think it was unthinkable to be unkind at Christmas, a sucker I was of the myth that Santa was “making a list and checking it twice, gonna find out who’s naughty and nice…”
But I still love Christmas. I still believe in magic. I still believe in miracles or at least in dreams coming true. Christmas is a social construct cleverly worded, rife with snowflakes and candy canes and mistletoes and sweaters embroidered with reindeer that resonates with our personal dreams, a defiant stand against our personal nightmares, a yearly reminder that we can only be as happy as we—or the fates—allow ourselves to be.
“So hang your shining star upon highest bough and have yourself a merry little Christmas now.”