Christmas carols that define us

Wikipedia has a long list of Filipino Christmas songs and carols.

I do not know nor recognize more than half of these except those that start blaring in Philippine malls from Sept. 1, to prime or condition us to shop compulsively at Christmas. All those Jose Mari Chan memes on social media the past year inspired the current McDonalds Christmas commercial. It depicts two obviously well-heeled children inside a chauffeur-driven car, going off to McDo. In the end, the boys morph into a pair of happy (not grumpy) old men: George Yang of the McDo franchise and Chan. I can only imagine the royalties that the singer earns from his 1990’s song, “Christmas in our hearts.”

I’ve been recalling the Christmas songs I remember from childhood: those learned in school, heard in church, and others I still hear in the mall or in online ads. All these can actually date me or people of my generation. Before OPM or Original Pilipino Music, our Christmas carols were foreign or “state-side,” like “Silent Night.” Perhaps the most universal Christmas carol, this was composed in 1818 by Franx Xaver Gruber and was originally in German. Then we have “Jingle Bells,” which was composed by James Pierpont in 1857 originally for Thanksgiving, not Christmas!

My parent’s generation hummed “White Christmas” composed by Irving Berlin in 1942. Or “The Christmas Song” aka “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire.” It was composed in the heat of summer in 1944 when Bob Wells and Mel Torme imagined winter so they’d feel cooler.

The Christmas songs I know and that we still hear today are those with the high-pitched voice of the young Michael Jackson when he was but part of that brothers’ group known as the Jackson 5. I remember showing a slide of Leonor Rivera drawn by Jose Rizal in class many years ago, and was dumbfounded when one of the students blurted out: “That’s not Leonor Rivera, that’s Michael Jackson after cosmetic surgery!”

Some of the Jackson songs we still hear today like “Santa Claus is coming to town” is from 1934, while “I saw mommy kissing Santa Claus” is from 1952. Both songs were made more famous in the Jackson 5 Christmas album recordings. “Give love on Christmas Day” (1970) is a song I always associate more with Michael Jackson as a solo singer, rather than as a group effort of the forgotten Jackson 5.

From the many songs I learned in grade school, three stand out and they are all Christmas songs. “The Little Drummer Boy” (1941) was easy because I could not sing and during choir, all I had to repeat was “pa-ra-pa-pum-pum.” Most complicated was “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” which dates back to 1780.

The one I learned in school was a 20th-century version that had: a partridge in a pear tree, two turtle doves, three French hens, and so on. This is a long, repetitious, boring, cumulative song, and I’m happy our math teachers did not use it to test us on addition and multiplication.

One song I did like because I read the book in the library and saw the animated film was “Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer” (1949). I memorized the name of Santa’s other reindeer: Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, and Blitzen, just as I did the names of the seven archangels: Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Surael, Seakiel, Sarathael, and Ananael, though there are other names like Uriel, Barchiel etc. They all end in “el.”

I am from that last generation that had 12 units of college Spanish as required by law. This was abolished during the term of former president Corazon Aquino, a short-sighted move inspired by bad teaching. All we did in four classes was to conjugate rather than learn to communicate or appreciate literature. If we were taught the way Instituto Cervantes teaches today, I would be a fluent Spanish-speaker after 12 units.

There is not much I remember from those classes except three things: “Adios patria adorada,” the first line from Jose Rizal’s “Ultimo Adios;” the first line from Rimas de Becquer that went “volveran los oscuros golondrinas,” and the 1970s Christmas hit, “Feliz Navidad,” composed by a homesick Puerto Rican. This song is going strong; I heard it playing in the original Spanish in the town plaza of Molo, Iloilo a few weeks ago.

Then came OPM and the very sad Christmas song, “Pasko na, sinta ko” (1970) made popular by Gary Valenciano. Who wants to be sad on Christmas Eve, right? That’s why we have Jose Mari Chan’s “Christmas in our hearts” (1990), “Ang Pasko ay sumapit,” and the rival Kapuso and Kapamilya Christmas tunes.

Christmas carols and songs are not just the seasonal tunes that run in the Philippines from Sept. to Jan. 6 (Three Kings). They are songs that date us, and more importantly, define us. We look back on the songs we learned growing up and look forward to the new ones that will be composed for generations after us.

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