Travel Blog Entry #1

Yesterday afternoon, I made a photo slideshow for a change. Maybe it’s just the Internet connection, but sadly the image resolution on the video seemed lower than in the originals.

South Korea is a beautiful, culture-rich country. The people are very hardworking and kind, the meals simple and healthy, every Korean-made product speaks of the highest quality.

Not being able to read road signs, brand names, magazines, and newspapers for six days has been a little frustrating for one who loves to read anything and everything, but this girl has become fascinated with how much the country has grown from being a poor nation to one that has one of the most promising economies today.

To experience what South Korea is a blessing-the country that gave birth to K-Pop, The Face Shop, Samsung, Hyundai, LG, and Koreanovelas-is like firsthand. Now I know how Koreans manage to have such clear skin and dress so stylishly: cosmetics stores are all over the place in Seoul, and the night market on Myeongdong Street is a haven for Korean street fashion.

I loved how coffee shops are everywhere. It was a delight to see a different café on every street from our foggy bus window.

The best part about the tour is that it was me and my family’s first time to experience winter. My sister brought along a glass jar in the hopes of catching a snowflake, although we only got to see very little snowfall during one freezing evening outside a restaurant near Konjiam Resort, a ski resort owned by LG Corporation in Gwangju-si City. Then again, that unanticipated snow falling around us like minuscule balls of white cotton already felt magical.

* * *

I wish I could spend more time writing about my recent travels, as well as about events that transpired the year before, but this pile of schoolwork keeps weighing heavily on me right when I got back to Manila. And so for now this is what I’ve got. :)

Living in a Bipolar City

This fairly long entry is one of the pieces I submitted for my creative nonfiction writing workshop class I took last semester. It was originally a short writing exercise we were encouraged to develop further and turn into a longer piece. This is what creative nonfiction is mostly like: writing about you and your world.

Hopefully someday though I’d get the chance to write about a wider range of subjects apart from myself. I don’t know about others, but it will never feel enough to write about one’s self all the time. But for now, this is what I’ve got.

Taken at the swimming pool deck of Marriot Hotel, Newport City Complex

I’ve got gadgets and gizmos aplenty; I’ve got whosits and whatsits galore. You want thingamabobs? I’ve got twenty. But who cares? No big deal. I want more. I wanna be where the people are. I wanna see, wanna see them dancing. Up where they walk, up where they run, up where they stay all day in the sun− wandering free, wish I could be, part of that world. “Part of Your World”, The Little Mermaid

Prologue

Once there was a girl who did not care how big the world is. She believed Manila was the only city where she was meant to be. Content in any place she finds herself in, she spent the first twelve years of her life in an apartment along Caballeros and Lavezares Streets. She did almost everything in the bedroom−watch cartoons, study, eat dinner, dress-up, play, sleep. The whole family slept there together, too−she and her sister on the floor on an inflatable mattress, her parents on a queen-sized bed. Occasional dripping from the ceiling, pesky rats, creeping cockroaches did not bother her, nor did she ever question if there could be a better place to be.

Her childhood alternated between home and school, a fifteen-minute drive or a thirty-peso calesa ride away. In school, she savored the thrill of writing down new vocabulary lists and the challenge of proving geometry theorems. A twenty-minute recess each day was packed with games of Chinese garter and jackstones, teasing chatter and lively babbles.

At home, she created colorful worlds in Lego towns, spurring friendships and catfights among Barbie and Bratz dolls, making up stories in Polly Pocket world and Sylvanian villages populated with little velvet animals. On Saturday afternoons, she and her younger sister first learned to play dress-up and throw the best sleepovers from her neighbor friends who live across the street: two bright and beautiful girls trained to speak in straight English and had such mature auras about them.

In spare moments, she immersed herself in solving mysteries with Nancy Drew, relate with quaint preteen life in Sweet Valley, felt Madison’s angst in Madison Finn series, found the meaning of friendship in The Baby-Sitters’ Club, learned magic spells with Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and relished teenage royalty in The Princess Diaries.

All the while, this girl, naïve as she was, did not for once give a thought about what freedom felt, what religion is for, nor what being committed meant. She did not aspire for things beyond her reach. She was not indifferent about world geography and foreign lands, but simply knowing they exist is good enough. She remained in a small corner of the world, satisfied and carefree.

* * *

Waiting

Stepping down from the car, she walked toward the station keeping her gaze straight ahead, reluctantly letting the lady security guard inspect her bag. She felt frustrated that bag inspection and body frisking was protocol in Manila train lines. Subways of Hong Kong and New York do not have security people in sight.

Two minutes till the next train. Sullen, emotionless faces wait with her. Some seemed as if they preferred not to be there. Some were in all-white uniforms, some were in grayish salesperson attire. Some were in slippers, some clutched copies of Inquirer Libre.

Riding the train would be a dozen times more pleasant, she thought, if only the stations’ gray walls were painted with blues and lavenders, if only two strangers could naturally exchange kind words, if only the speaker system played classical tunes, instead of robotic voices repeatedly reminding passengers to practice good passenger etiquette.

She loved looking at little children, imagining the kind of men and women they will grow up to be. There was a bald man wearing white robes−he definitely had to be a monk. Standing beside him was an indifferent teenage boy in a sleeveless shirt, smeared shorts, and slippers. A couple sat holding each other’s hands, with dreamy expressions, as if nothing else mattered.

Four stations left. Someone offers her a seat. Between squeezing in between strangers and standing, with her laptop in one arm and bag in the other, she always preferred the latter. She stepped outside and stumbled upon more nameless people, seemingly having nothing better to do than walk the streets aimlessly, dreaming the same dreams of the finer life, owning thoughts she could never possibly know. She looked up; the sky was on the verge of tears.

* * *

Walking

It was a rainy Saturday morning as she stepped inside the black SUV. Classes were put on hold. Her white polka-dotted skirt and black cotton lace blouse matched the grayish blue skies. “I wonder if we are the only crazy college students who went out during a storm today,” she told him. He smiled, keeping his eyes on the wet roads before them.

After grabbing some cinnamon churros from a nearby supermarket, they walked towards the two-story café. She always nagged him to go there; and finally. he obliged that day. They walked along the empty streets on Manila’s equivalent of Upper East Side, with numbers as street and avenue names to boot. It was easy to imagine she was in another city, to momentarily forget the images of drudgery and despair. It was even easier to trick her mind that this city didn’t have any problems of hunger, corruption, scandal, crime. It was the easiest to feel there is nothing wrong in the world at all, especially when surrounded by shops selling luxury pastries and gelato, where people walk their dogs dressed in pink tutus and matching ribbons.

The high ceiling, the scent of warm mocha, her arm gently touching his made her never want to leave. The people around them were preoccupied with iPads and Macbooks, probably catching up on work.

Five minutes left. She wished time could stop.

If only he did not fret about the rain and the weather, she prefer to walk around the streets. She could walk all day. Walking is her therapy; a time to think, a time to savor this flurry of independence and freedom, a time to make sense of things.Time could not stand still. She stepped back into his car, rushing to get home.

* * *

Wishing

From the station, she hurried to her dad’s car. Beyond the glass window of the cold interior of the SUV, she glimpsed figments of strangers’ lives. Passing through narrow streets, they were surrounded by people whose main worries were about having something to eat each day and waking up the next morning with their sense of hope still intact.

Young men in matching white polos and black slacks military-cut hair, learning how to guard the city well. High school girls dancing on a cemented area underneath the highway, with cars around them and gray smoke in the air. The men slept idly on their sidecars, waiting for someone looking for a ride. Women with vegetable and fruit carts. A blond girl walked by, her mere presence exuding light from the dullness of it all.

She closed her eyes, not wanting to see anymore. Seeing poverty and chaos around her made her selfishly wish that she didn’t live in this wretched place. She remembered sending a thought via Twitter, into the void, lamenting on how she did not want to live in Manila anymore, how she wished this city could be walk-friendly so she could go anywhere alone. Wanting to forget the people she saw from her backseat window, she closed her eyes. But it was too late.

* * *

Wondering

She opened her eyes and glanced outside the car window: she was surrounded by lush green trees, cars of varying shades and sizes, multitudes of students walking past. She stepped down the car and walked towards the campus grounds as she mentally planned the day ahead, unconsciously forgot about yesterday, inevitably fretted a little about tomorrow.

In Philippine history class, her teacher assigned the class an individual project, instructing them to make Philippine history relevant to us, in the most creative way we can. Intramuros, she immediately thought. I want to go to Fort Santiago in Intramuros. I will take pictures, portraying how I see that historic site through my camera’s lens. It has been four years since I’ve last been there, with my best high school girl friends. This is my chance to go to there again. This time, by myself.

Staring into space as she habitually does, she began to wonder how different it could be, to walk down the streets of a foreign land. She wondered how it felt, to wear a trench coat and boots on snowy winter mornings. She wondered how her meek self would blend in a university filled with impassioned students her age, how she would make international friends from more than a dozen nations.

She once learned in cognitive psychology class that children’s spatial abilities are different from those of adolescents and adults. Children’s still undeveloped brains have a distorted sense of space, wherein they make plenty of exaggerations about distances and land areas. More mature people on the other hand, have more accurate spatial representations in their minds and are able to estimate distances better. Perhaps this is why in a sudden epiphany, she sometimes feels like a prisoner in her own city, and has become more aware of the need to pop the bubble she finds herself in. There isn’t enough life to be found by going around and about a constant number of square kilometers of land. She needs to see more.

Although she does not want to be a tourist; the dream is to live in a foreign country independently, to walk freely along streets and go someplace new.

She believes that her greatest dream would knock down her greatest fear of not be able to accomplish the things she was meant to do. There must be more that she could be capable of, and that meant going to places, to meet people apart from familiar circles, even if it meant leaving everything else behind.

* * *

Epilogue

In recent years, she realizes that Manila is disorderly, quirky, perennially interesting−in short, bipolar. Middle and upper class societies live similar urban lifestyles in Manila in two ways. First, malls and theaters are the second sanctuaries of people after Sunday masses. Secondly, being on chaotic Manila streets is inescapable, where all forms of commute−jeepneys, calesas and sidecars, tricycles and bicycles, creaky trains and light rail trains, buses and taxis galore−fill up the streets, finding both drivers and passengers inevitably dazed as they travel towards their destinations.

This capital city is painted with the loud colors of popular culture, media, and postmodernity splashed with contrasting personalities of 11 million people, sprinkled with the grayness of poverty. Living in this city reminds her to be thankful to be raised in a middle-class family as she goes out often seeing less fortunate ones sleeping on the streets, little girls holding out their grubby hands on car windows.

A select few corners of this metropolis springs of quaint and modern architecture, of skyscrapers and palatial residential buildings. Places for shopping abound, from sari-sari stores to designer boutiques. Students and employees in uniforms stride quickly to their schools and offices in a not-so-walk-friendly city.

For her to walk in the city’s streets alone, going wherever she wants without anybody driving her to the places (including the train station, the only form of commute she is allowed to make use of) is a rarity. Being a restless, travel-thirsty girl, one simple dream is to live in a beautifully structured city where she can wander away with a carefree heart, albeit momentarily.

Her love-hate relationship with bipolar Manila remains, until the city government finds a way to let her go places without having to ride a car, until the city becomes walk-friendly, until she can go out of her home whenever she wants, and not worry about anything. This girl eventually began to care how big the world is. She will not cease treading new paths, until she discovers where she is truly meant to be.

I get lost in the beauty
Of everything I see
The world ain’t half as bad
As they paint it to be.
~ Come Home, One Republic

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Endless Lists

An article, a magazine layout, a thesis, a dream of becoming someone.

A dentist appointment, an email, a blog entry, a plan for the future.

A date, a meeting, a celebration, a conversation, a chance to feel alive.

A skill to learn (typography), a book to read (Let the Great World Spin), a film to see (Never Let Me Go), a place to be in (museums and art galleries).

Lists upon lists. Typed on a silver metal notebook with black keys touched by weary yet hopeful fingers. Numbered, highlighted, pondered upon.

Life is made up of the greatly abstract things. Love, philosophy, art, psychology, engineering, beauty, biology, rocket science, color theory, optometry. Life is felt with the small things: the delicate movements, the words spoken once and will never be heard again in the same way. A breath of fresh air in a new city, a long walk on an empty street, coins for a beggar. A mistake, an accomplishment, a broken promise, a deadline met.

There are 54 items on my Things for Semestral Break List (made up of tasks ranging from mundane to silly to difficult to time-consuming to seemingly impossible) - half are highlighted, half are most probably will be left untouched for a longer time, as the flurry and busyness of school begins in a few days.

But I will keep making lists. Until I break down, until I figure out why, and how.

Universities List

Book Log

Travel Checklist

Things to Change In Myself

Things to Do Before Turning 24

“Don’t settle.”

Steve Jobs. I have been referencing and thinking about his insanely amazing life a lot lately.

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”

Things to Write About

3. how Apple products have changed my life

For a perennially lost and confused girl, writing lists, keeping track of progress and undying aspirations, helps her stay sane and encouraged to keep going. After all, we are not given a guidebook of how to move and act in this crazy and sometimes miserable but always beautiful, albeit fleeting and ephemeral, world. You get to, have to make your own set of rules, then follow them faithfully.

Things to Improve On

1. writing

2. being on time

3. keeping promises

4. staying true to oneself and especially when with others

5. this blog

What’s on your list?

(still) Finding my voice

A couple of outtakes from my casual shoot for the AEGIS 2012 Yearbook. Taken by Tony the photographer from Agencie, Inc., slightly edited in Adobe Photoshop by me.

This entry is long overdue.

College is when I have encountered some of life’s dark days, when the taste of bitter failure and bland disappointment have become a bit too familiar. There were lonesome lunch breaks spent with a laptop or a book or class readings for company. There were deadlines missed, decisions unfulfilled, dreams half-baked. Lost things and lost hopes. Hesitations and humiliations. An inseparable pair called uncertainty and insecurity creep into conscious thoughts at random moments.

What’s more, countless what-if-I-did-this-instead scenarios spring to mind. What if I chose to study English literature instead? Or creative writing? Or communication? Why did I end up in psychology again? Oh yeah, because I want to learn more about what makes people the way they are, in all their beautifully strange complexities, for me to write better about them.

Regardless of endless mistakes, the idealistic optimist in me kept the paranoid worry wart from emerging. I rarely lost enthusiasm in studying, in fulfilling every academic requirement, in staying curious, in rushing to class, to simply live out whatever Magis means to me. I find myself doing these while managing to sneak in some time for a tryst, a shopping spree, a riveting book, a compelling movie, a delightful restaurant dinner, a snatch of conversation and a captivating story.

Troubles and trifles aside, the last three years have been the most incredibly amazing years of my life so far.

This is an excerpt from a piece I have written for my creative writing (non-fiction) class, wherein I wrote a letter to my seventeen-year-old self:

“…You still have not shed more weight than you aspired to have, lived and studied independently in another continent, nor made tangible that persisting image of your byline printed in black letters on a glossy page. You however, have learned other priceless lessons that will come in handy for a lifetime. You will slowly realize that with patience and faith, time is on your side. Your life plan does not happen exactly how you imagine it, and yet, other things manage to happen instead, usually far more interesting and surprising than you’d dare imagine. Most of all, there are those whom you will meet in the last three years..,”

Definitely, college life would not mean anything to me without people around me. There are the people whom I have crossed paths with-strangers, close friends and friendly acquaintances, epic, crazy, and daunting teachers, and there are people admired from afar.

Three years have been indescribably wonderful, 90% because of the chance to meet such interestingly amazing persons, 10% for all the life-altering lessons learned from them. These lessons are not found anywhere but someplace where knowledge and opinions, diversity, people you share the same generation with, thrive and interact so unreservedly, like nowhere else in the world. Universities, in general. Universities with sprawling campus grounds and picturesque architecture. Universities where there is no racism nor sexism. Universities where students discover who they are through the lives of other people. Universities where separate disciplines, like moral philosophy and experimental psychology, biology and theology, can seamlessly intertwine. To be a student in a university is to open yourself up to a multitude of worlds at the same time that you have to actively be aware that you are in, every single day, else it will just be someplace you go to just because you need to. Naturally, we go to places or do things because we need to; but maybe sometimes, it’s not enough to need. Maybe we have to genuinely want it as well.

University life is what you make of it, as it is with every other aspect of existence.

* * *

This is me, attempting to find my voice once again, hoping to lessen the cliché and to build more panache, to make writing feel more natural and spontaneous once more, like the girl who once used Calvin & Hobbes and Snoopy comics and handwriting fonts in her campaign materials to win people’s hearts into voting for her as she runs for English secretary her high school’s student council, or that girl who, when reading a mystery book, is able to escape for hours from her messy Manila life, or that girl who gets lost easily, although happily does so, trusting that she will somehow find her way back. ☁

Being Eighteen

With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. ~ Desiderata

image by nikolinelr

Every year, people’s hearts are filled with bright hopes, sheer optimism, new beginnings, and infinite possibilities. One of my resolutions this year is to work on my writing as well as my blog entries, which I strive to fill with more insight and less fluff, with a deeper personal touch and fewer clichéd ideas.

I write in the hopes that I could reach out to friends and strangers whom I want to touch but can’t because of the hurdles of time and distance. I write as my own actions are every so often ambiguous, that I may sometimes stammer when I talk. I write in order to make sense of what’s happening to me and around me.

Looking back on my rather eventful 2009, I realize that I want to chronicle the little moments and events that have shaped me into who I am now.

Therefore, I want to begin a series of blog entries I call Eighteen Things: different lists of eighteen things that defined me during the year 2009. Why 18? Because I am turning 19 in a couple of months, of course. This is perhaps my way of assuring myself that I did my best in making my only chance of being an eighteen-year-old girl a meaningful and awesome one.

To my very few wonderful readers, I truly appreciate you taking the time to read this blog of mine. I am forever grateful. As I share bits and pieces of my life, I always hope that I have also shared a few ideas one could use, little inspirations to change, and doses of happiness to whoever is reading. I aim to make this blog more interactive and reader-friendly in the months to come, and to reply to each and every comment.

I want to continue writing this blog together with you, while we ourselves continue to grow. Let’s together look forward to this year, throwing away our worries and troubles, and to bring our big audacious dreams, highest hopes, unconditional love, and unwavering faith with us. Let’s be thankful not only for the happy moments but also for the difficult ones. 2010 is just beginning to unfold. Remember to make each and every single day count. Starting…now!

My first The Eighteen Series entry to be posted soon.

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My First Prayer

A quiet light, the harvesting by imfreelykeely

Note: This is my first reflection paper entitled “My First Prayer” that we were asked to submit in Theology class which Father Sormani decided not to grade but simply to let us write freely an how we see God from our own perspectives.

Albeit spending a lot of time working on this paper, I felt that these are such shallow, naîve thoughts, and exposes the clueless, confused person behind these words. As I reread my own work, it humbles me to realize that I know so little about myself and the world around me. Nonetheless, here is what I have written, summing up in prose my very vague idea of faith, of God, of how we ought to spend our brief moments of existence.

“To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.”

G.K. Chesterton, English born Gabonese Critic, Essayist, Novelist and Poet, 1874-1936

THE most haunting, vivid, unforgettable memories from the past are events when these have brought about intense, vehement emotions in people. That must be why I can still remember ever so clearly when I was still little, about six or seven, I lay awake in bed at night, daydreaming about the vastness of the universe. These thoughts came about maybe because I have recently read a colorful book on astronomy. That was the first time that I have learned that one day, the Sun will use up all its energy, explode, and shrink into a white dwarf just like all the other stars in the universe. The Sun will expand into a red giant, millions of times larger than its size, and endanger all its surrounding planets, including Earth, our only home in the infinite darkness of outer space.

This catastrophic event is millions of years away, a time in which none of us can predict what humanity’s fate will be then. But a curious child as I was, I began to imagine the fate of the universe, millions of years from now. Suddenly, fear crept over me—my heart was beating more quickly, my sleepiness has vanished. The frightening thoughts slowly come, one by one. One day, there would be no more life in the universe, after all the stars have consumes all their energies. One day, there would be no more human beings, living and breathing on earth. One day, there will be total darkness. Forever. I became so frightened that I was almost unbearable, but I did not cry nor make a sound. I just lay sideways on my bed, worried and troubled, not knowing what to do next.

Then I remembered something. I remembered there is a place where everyone goes when they die. Making the sign of the cross, I began to pray. I can recall vaguely that I begged Him to save my family, my friends, and everyone else from the end of the world, as absurd as it sounds. I prayed that when we die, our souls would end up someplace safe. Safe from darkness and exploding stars. I prayed for the same thing for a few consecutive nights, feeling my fear slowly diminish, although not completely.

That night was when I did my first real, serious prayer. How do I prove it is seriously real? Simply put, it is because I have never gone to church with my family. My first encounter of God was, I believe, through a children’s bible I have read from cover to cover, and by watching television. My parents tell me we’re Roman Catholic, but I don’t remember them teaching me anything about God or religion. I have studied in a non-sectarian school all my life. The act of putting my hands together to talk to a divine being about my fear of the sun’s imminent explosion simply seemed the only natural thing to do at that moment. So I guess I have learned to pray by myself that night, attempting to talk to Him with all my heart. I continue to pray more in the days succeeding that fateful night, before I go to sleep.

Fast-forward to the present, my relationship with God may have strengthened, although not that much. I experienced my first real mass during my first day in the Ateneo, aside from weddings and funerals. Right after that, I began to attend mass in the chapel when I have time after my class—something I have never done before.

Now, as I think about it, I am still quite uncertain how deeply my relationship with God and my spirituality is. I think I am still searching for Him, yearning to know what it really feels to have true faith. I still do not know who or what God is that well. I admittedly do not think about God much every day, as I make choices, face personal challenges, and simply finding my way in this wondrous planet.

I always find myself searching for that deeper meaning to life and asking, am I doing things right? I may not be directly talking to God through prayer, but through my actions, maybe I am living out God’s plan. Then again, I do not know for sure.

On some days I believe God is a form of light energy. On some days I believe God is love. On some days I do not think about God at all. Nonetheless, I believe God is real most of the time, because I think the thought, or the “idea” that there is a supreme being governing us all, that he sent his one and only son to save us, is so profound and beautiful, that I want to believe it. This is the kind of faith I hold on to right now, but I am quite certain that I will learn even more in time, and I know my faith would either falter or strengthen, as I strive to weigh, consider, reflect, wonder, and stay enthralled with experiences that slowly unfold.

I am still searching for God. I want to know better how God fits into the confounding riddle of existence. I want to understand the Bible, to study theology, to find really meaning in my life and of the others around me whom I have learned to love.

For now, I believe in God because having faith in a higher being who is said to be the Way, the Truth, and the Life simply is a beautiful thing. Having faith helps me give a sense of direction of why I do the things I do right now, as I aim to only do things I believe are meaningful, beautiful, and truthful. It sort of makes sense that way, as some (or most?) of my values sort of match what the Bible says, and vice versa.

Besides, it doesn’t make sense that after witnessing how wondrous and majestic life on earth can be, that the universe will just plunge into total darkness forever, like turning the lights off, pulling backs the curtains in a theater, after a spectacular show has ended. Eternal life must somehow exist.

“Nice. You’re on a wonderful journey!”

- Father Sormani’s comment on my paper

A late Christmas post

Kisses are sparks of love, wonderfully magical. A kiss in Christmas, then, is a shower of magic sparks, radiating the world.

image by the half-blood prince

December is not only the most eventful month of the whole year, but the perfect month during which people can deeply reflect about their spirituality, about life, about the year that has passed, especially since there are so many non-working holidays and it’s Christmas break for us students.

In Theology class, Father reminded us that Christmas is supposed to be celebrating the miraculous birth of a baby boy 2009 years ago who was destined to save humanity. If people are merely celebrating Christmas for love, joy, and peace, Father said they must make another holiday, celebrating love and joy and peace. I giggled at his way of putting it.

He also said some interesting things about Christmas traditions we all have grown accustomed to. Candy canes symbolize Joseph’s cane, where the white is for purity and red is for blood. Wreaths signify eternity. Christmas trees are originally fir trees with green leaves all year that mark God’s everlasting love. Although nowadays, we see white, red Christmas trees, and brightly multi-colored candy canes. We worry about what gifts to give, and stress over gaining weight during the endless parties, amidst holiday ham, sweets, and fruitcake.

Father’s remarks made me wonder how one should really celebrate Christmas. I feel that it’s ironic that we celebrate Christmas but never even once do I hear my family and relatives during Christmas Eve talk about Jesus Christ, wishing him a happy birthday, wherever in heaven He is now.

All these beautiful hidden meanings make me feel guilty that I have been seeing Christmas only on a superficial level. What more are we missing? Christmas is already magical when one looks at the Christmas lights, the night masses that’s special in the Philippines, the shine on one’s eyes as she receives a parcel wrapped in red and green. What more when we think about the miracle of Jesus’s birth, about the hidden metaphors in the Bible story, about why there are twelve days of Christmas, why we celebrate Christmas on December 25, why couples kiss under the mistletoe, why do we deck the halls with boughs of holly (As much as I want to explain the rest here, it would be fun to do your own research)?

Instead, we talked about how the baked salmon and the chicken pot pie were utterly delicious over bottles of red wine. We laughed and about the littlest, craziest matters. Most of the attention fell on my aunt’s own little baby boy Carr, who turned a year old this month. This Christmas Eve became a little more lively with a new member of the family, watching him struggle to balance on his feet, slowly learning to walk by himself. He, like baby Jesus, is so young and innocent, full of infinite possibilities.

Having said all this, I may want to disagree with Father, even just a bit. Maybe Christmas is not just about Jesus Christ. It could also be a time to celebrate life that God (whoever one believes) has given us, and the love that He wants human beings to share and feel. Christmas is also about giving and sharing what we have, to those who need it more. Who says there is only one way of celebrating Christmas?

Christmas will forever be my favorite season. Even though I wish we have winter in Manila, that one day I would wake up seeing snowflakes falling from our window wearing woolen gloves and socks (sewn by Mrs. Weasley??), while I sip on a warm cup of coffee, a Starbucks limited edition Christmas blend. Get it while it lasts, it’s worth the sweet treat. It’s Christmas in a cup. Don’t forget to share! ;)

Merry Christmas everyone! May God bless each and every one of us.

“Christmas waves a magic wand over this world, and behold, everything is softer and more beautiful.”

- Norman Vincent Peale