Christmas is for children

When I think beyond carolers and inaanak collecting their gifts with the greeting “Maligayang Pasko,” I often wonder: How would we celebrate Christmas if Spain did not come to our shores in the 16th century? How different would Christmas be if Spain ceded the Philippines to Portugal in accordance with the 1493 papal bull Inter caetera that cut the world in half like an orange, and provided Spain and Portugal with rights over areas of the world unknown to them that each would “discover”? (The Philippines lay on the Portuguese side of the world.)

Christmas would also be different had the British stayed in Manila in the 18th century and extended their authority over the rest of the islands. It is said that Germany had an eye on the Philippines, too, and this was one of the reasons the United States gave for taking the Philippines from Spain in 1898. Then we had the Japanese in World War II. What if they had not lost the war and stayed on? If we were never colonized by a Western country, like Thailand, would we still be celebrating Christmas the way we do today?

When you look at the root of “Maligayang Pasko,” you will not be surprised that “Pasko” comes from the Spanish. What is unexpected is that the Spanish Christmas greeting is “Feliz Navidad” because “Pascua” refers to the Jewish “passover” and also to Easter. What is unexpected by most is that “Pascua” or “Pasko” literally means Easter.

In the Philippines, “pasko” refers to Christmas or the birth of Christ; it is different from “Pasko ng pagkabuhay,” which refers to Easter Sunday or Christ’s rebirth after death. In the Philippines, we celebrate Christmas with more gusto than Easter. We celebrate Christmas Eve (Noche Buena, literally “Good Night”) and again New Year’s Eve (Media Noche, literally “midnight”). Food and cheer are basically the same except that gifts are exchanged during Christmas, and at the New Year table there are round fruits and other items meant to bring in a prosperous new year.

Christmas makes us remember the past; it makes us look back to our childhood when life was carefree. In my aunts’ house in Pampanga there is a division between young and old. The main dining table for the adults and all the other tables for everyone else though each table in each room in the house is taken by a particular age group: The children eat quickly and disappear into one of the rooms to play, the teens eat on a coffee table in the sala; they don’t mind the lack of chairs because their limbs are nimble and they can get up from the floor without help. A long table out on the verandah is occupied by cousins and their children and grandchildren. It only hit me recently that I have moved from playroom, to coffee table, to main table now, being an uncle or a granduncle to the children of my cousins.

Sitting at the Christmas table last year reminded me of the Rizal house in Calamba and what the family’s Christmases would be if the brothers Jose and Paciano had not become filibusteros. Since Francisco Mercado and Teodora Alonso had 11 children, the national hero would have been a busy uncle and granduncle during Christmas. In “El Filibusterismo” Rizal wrote something many Pinoys can relate to:

“Christmas day in the Philippines is, according to the elders, a fiesta for the children, who are perhaps not of the same opinion and who, it may be supposed, have for it an instinctive dread. They are roused early, washed, dressed, and decked out with everything new, dear, and precious that they possess–high silk shoes, big hats, woolen or velvet suits, without overlooking four or five scapularies, which contain texts from St. John, and thus burdened they are carried to the high mass, where for almost an hour they are subjected to the heat and the human smells from so many crowding, perspiring people, and if they are not made to recite the rosary they must remain quiet, bored, or asleep. At each movement or antic that may soil their clothing they are pinched and scolded, so the fact is that they do not laugh or feel happy, while in their round eyes can be read a protest against so much embroidery and a longing for the old shirt of week-days.

“Afterwards, they are dragged from house to house to kiss their relatives’ hands. There they have to dance, sing, and recite all the amusing things they know, whether in the humor or not, whether comfortable or not in their fine clothes, with the eternal pinchings and scoldings if they play any of their tricks. Their relatives give them cuartos which their parents seize upon and of which they hear nothing more. The only positive results they are accustomed to get from the fiesta are the marks of the aforesaid pinchings, the vexations, and at best an attack of indigestion from gorging themselves with candy and cake in the houses of kind relatives. But such is the custom, and Filipino children enter the world through these ordeals, which afterwards prove the least sad, the least hard, of their lives.

“Adult persons who live independently also share in this fiesta, by visiting their parents and their parents’ relatives, crooking their knees, and wishing them a merry Christmas. Their Christmas gift consists of a sweetmeat, some fruit, a glass of water, or some insignificant present.”

* * *

Comments are welcome at [email protected]