Why Christmas?

On a mountain bike, one often encounters restaurant billboards at intervals. Every kilometer or so, it seems these ads are counting down, telling you to keep going, and to get going to their establishments. Five km away, 1 km, 200 meters…

The trip gets grueling, but after each billboard, I am reminded of what awaits us at the top. The image of the red and green logo serves as the lighthouse on this sojourn. Green and red. Hmm.

We know we want, yet not what we want, blinking on and off, from one color to another, like the lights adorning the trees and roofs come the Yuletide season. And now here’s Christmas, short and passing, and yet constant and anticipated.

We want both Change and What Is Constant, two seemingly contradictory (but, in reality, complementary) things. Like something milky and spicy. Bicol Express. Green and red (the chili peppers), snow-white (the milky coconut sauce), and meat. Christmas for the Filipino. Warm food on a warm day, cold drinks on a cold night. And circles. The family circle. The parol in their frames. Ball lights. Rounded cheeks (and stomachs?). The same punch lines with new premises. The same faces with changing features. The Christmas ham. The gift-given becoming the gift giver. Circles.

Or maybe not.

Maybe a spiral would be more apt. A gently rotating spiral. Reaching out and drawing from within. Ever expanding, but intact within itself. Not simply rotating, but growing.

Rather than view Christmas as something we simply go back to, something liminal, obligatory, or traditional, we can view it as a prompt, a reminder, a pat on the back.

Something transcendent, as we are works in progress.

It’s not simply sappy, fleeting nostalgia but a marker of memory, when we tell ourselves, “I remember when I first tasted Christmas ham; I wonder how much I’ve changed since then!”

I wonder how we have changed since then, and if our actions have sweetened the ham.

Why Christmas? In the grueling bike trail that is life, sometimes we don’t need radical, fresh-off-the-press (er, blogroll?) ideas. The clichés are not clichés when they become relevant. When they are lived.

It’s nice to see a signpost telling you that you’re heading somewhere. Somewhere bright.

(Come to think of it, I suddenly am craving for Bicol Express, or ham… Kaon na, Pilipino, lasapin at isabuhay ang noche buena.)

Peavey Vergara, 20, is a communication student at Ateneo de Manila University and alchemist in training.