A clutch of carols

“THAT IS  my  favorite  carol,” declared  our  granddaughter Kristin, 8. “Mine too,” said Kathie,  5.

The two meant  “Ang Pasko Ay Sumapit,”   the hijacked Tagalog  version of  “Kasadya Ning  Takna-a,” a winning  daygon  first played at  the 1933  Cebu Christmas festival.

The two kids  plan to carol  in their subdivision.

“When?” we  asked.  “After   Alexia and  Tai Noelle arrive,” they answered.

Their  two cousins, age 9 and 6, will  fly in from San Francisco for  Christmas.  “Being fluent in French, they can  belt  out ‘Joyeux Noel,”’ my wife told the two. “But  ‘Kasadya’ will be new to them.”

The late Vicente D. Rubi of  Cebu composed  “Kasadya.” Mariano Vestil scribbled the lyrics. A  Manila recording company  swiped their work  in 1938.  Both were never compensated or given  credit.

Until his death in 1980, impoverished widower Rubi would  shuffle to his gates and teach startled carolers how to sing his daygon.  Lyricist Vestil went to his grave in 2004 noted only  by an inside-page, below-the-fold newspaper obituary.

“It remains supreme irony that not the slightest effort has been made to attribute the beloved carol ‘Ang Pasko Ay Sumapit’  to  Vicente D. Rubi  and  Mariano  Vestil  of Cebu,”  columnist Julie Yap Daza  wrote.

As Christmas  approaches, impoverished promdis again   trek into cities  from upland barangays. They  sing, for a few coins, now rarely heard daygons.

Cops, meanwhile, round up out-of-school kids who carol with bottle-cap tambourines. They zigzag between vehicles in heavy traffic.

These grimy street troubadours never  heard of  an ex-president who will listen to carols in a hospital suite turned into a prison cell.  Tell them about  a  “midnight”  Chief Justice whose 19-0  decisions  are “untarnished by a negative vote”  against the jailed  president, and all you get is  a blank stare. These mean nothing to often food-short kids who should be in school.

In this country, 22 percent of people are undernourished. Compare that to Malaysia’s two percent.  Poor nutrition stunts almost half (47 percent) of the children in Negros Occidental and Northern Samar.

Yet their  carols  are about  “a season that gives us  an array of luminous images that hint at all manner of annunciations,” New Yorker magazine notes.

Some carols  go back years.  And old favorites like  “Adeste Fildelis” and  “Silent Night”  endure. But whatever happened to those lilting Spanish carols? Grey-haired “oldies” like us wonder.

“Every   Christmas Day,  we still  sing these villancicos (Spanish carols), in front of the belen  in my mother’s home,” Ricky Gallaga e-mailed from Bacolod City.  “We have done  that over the years.”

“Our  Nativity set survived World War II,” Gallaga continued. “It has been in our family for the past 80 years.  In the 1950s, my grandaunt, Tia Trina,  would sit in front of the piano and lead the family in singing these villancicos.

“Among the carols we sing are: ‘Vamos, pastores, vamos, vamos a Belen’ and  ‘A ver en aquel nino, la Gloria del Eden.’  My  mother  continues this tradition. And my brothers and a sister teach these to our grandchildren.

“These  carols  truly reflect what Christmas is all about.  I feel sad when people tell us to be politically correct and greet each other ‘Happy Holidays.’  Christmas is Christ.”

Overseas Filipino workers  brought  these  carols  to over 193 countries and territories. Roughly 3,752 Filipinos leave daily today.  That’s 28 times the first clutch of timid migrants who left five decades back. They are young; the majority are  between 25 and 44 years old. And 36 out of every 100 have a college degree.

Their remittances may crest at $23 billion this Christmas, up from $14.4 billion in 2007. Filipinos are the world’s fourth highest remitters, after Indians, Chinese and Mexicans.

“Malapit na ang Pasko, mahal,”  says a typical text message from the spouse left  at  home  (the majority are male).  “Ang daming gastos.  Dagdagan mo  ang padala mo.”

“Pasko na, anak,” a parent writes. “Padala ka naman ng bagahe. Sabay mo na rin ang aginaldo namin.”

“Few bother to  say salamat,”  wrote an OFW. Among the 10 lepers cured, only one came back to give thanks.

“Christmas in the Middle East is just an ordinary working day unless it falls on a Friday,” the OFW said. “It’s the season of joy for most, but it’s also the season of homesickness for us.”

His blog reminds us of  one Christmas  Eve  at the Society of  the Divine Word’s  mother house in Rome.  Star lanterns festooned Verbiti. Lights blinked from a Nativity crib. Lechon was on the table. OFWs  sang carols, including “Ang Pasko Ay Sumapit” and “Pasko Na Naman.” Tears slipped from tightly closed eyes. Christmas  is “Emmanuel, God with us” in the dark, loneliness and pain, Filipino SVD fathers told their expat flock.

Here is part of the diaspora’s untabulated costs. Hidden behind those foreign exchange remittances are pain, separation, alienation, trauma even. Tiene cara de hambre  (You have the face of hunger).

“The Bethlehem story  gives us an array of luminous images,” Jesuit theologian Fr. Catalino Arevalo writes. “The night sky  is  alight with bright angels, simple shepherds startled from sleep, magi. It is a happening for the deepest heart….”

“The hopes and fears of all the years/Are met in thee tonight,”  says the 1861 carol on the little town of Bethlehem. Indeed,  the unique grace of Christmas is that carol composer  and carol thief, migrant and stay-at-homes  can say together with  kings and shepherds: “Let us go to Bethlehem and see what the Lord has made known to us.”

(E-mail: juanlmercado@gmail.com)