Feelings
This last one, too, becomes Christmas past!
By Emmanuelle
There was a time when we were young and Christmas trees were tall. And truly pine. The upland forest has not deforested itself yet and DENR has not gone all the way too protective. And the natives were whoopingly rich for a day with each young tree they cut and sold.
It was up by the first of December, and down by the time the Three Kings were done with their deed and gone. But for a month and a week of the old and the new year, the house would have that fresh cool mountain smell, and you would go around breathing a lungful of it in. The pine-scented room-freshener was then just a figment in an inventor’s imagination.
Weeks, even months before Christmas, the plates, bowls and cups in glassed-in cabinets make way to a formidable display of cans and bottles and boxed groceries. There were yet no tetrapacks and tipid sachets to clutter the neat pyramids of goods.
And there was no making-do with a budget stretched thin to the limit. Everything was affordable, gawa-dito (locally-made) or galing-sa-labas (imported). You stocked on complete ingredients for cakes and salads, and for the beefy, porky and poultry dishes in your planned table offerings. Yes, dear, all were home-cooked and rare was the ready-made. There were none the likes of Goldilocks, Red Ribbons, Swifts, and Purefoods.
Every kid believed in Santa Klaus, and chased far-and-quick was the kill-joy who would dare choke the fun out of believing. It didn’t matter that the gifts could not have been possibly sent down through non-existent fireplaces by reindeers dashing with sweat on their brows through warm skies over tropical isles. There really was Santa, though he may be stuffily overdressed for our climate or too incongruously whitely Caucasian.
He knew when you’ve been good, he knew when you’ve been bad, he knew when you were naughty or nice. So you were good for goodness sake while he was still making the list, and checking it twice. And what a list it must had been! Gifts he brought ranged from expensive bicycles to foot-pushed trolleys and red or blue roller-skates. From waist-high dolls with long curly silvery blond hair to stiff-legged Tammy dolls the mother and aunties of knee-bending gymnast Barbies. The literary classics and the Nancy Drew books were in hard covers, and coloring books were so thick you surely would not have them all colored until the next Christmas batch of more coloring books. And landscape puzzles that spread out to full floor carpet size. And beside the puzzle pieces, a battle zone of miniature mountains, hills, trains and tracks, green jeeps and greener tanks, guns and cannons, brave stiff plastic soldiers with no enemies visible from the other side. Unless you were given two sets. Then you really have a war not just a battle going on!
A day or two before Pasko, house activities in the house centered on what were freezing or unfreezing, mixing, baking, boiling, steaming, frying in the kitchen. Thigh-length ham with the thigh still in (or was that a leg?) got pummeled, drowned in special sauces and spices, then allowed to torture the household with its dizzyingly cloyingly warm oven smells. Fruit cakes were so thickly fruitily glazed and brandied that you get crazily drunk at the crumbling of the first thin slice. Tinsel-wrapped ice cream cakes to kill and die for, and these were really airy chiffon with the insides scooped out and filled-in with a cocktail of fruits whipped in canned Nestlé’s cream then quickly frozen. And to the sweet-toothed asking for more, leche flan and halayang ube and yema balls dipped in crunchy caramelized sugar.
Moms made sure everyone trooped to midnight mass held exactly two hours before midnight, in new red dresses or shirts. At the end of the singing and the chanting of the priest in Latin, you flow with the rush to the makeshift manger. You tiptoe and try to wipe a blessed limb or to kiss a plump holy toe of the Child Jesus on His bed of hay. You go home feeling good, feeling sure everything was going to be fine in your small world for now, and feeling really positively starving. At that reminder, your tummy growled. It had a distinct memory of a dining table groaning with holiday food you could not possibly consume in one delicious sitting or two.
At sa gitna ng iyong pagmumuni-muni, the neighborhood kids would throw firecrackers at the churchgoers going home, just for the fun of it. And you would join the chorus of outraged shouts and high-pitched screams. The New Year is next week, ngayon ay Pasko, bakit kayo nagpapaputok? Curses, curses. It was that easy to forget you have just been to church.
But then, you never really forget your Christmases past, do you? Lalong-lalo na when the arrozcaldo you served your own kids for noche buena had only the whiff of a chicken cube to recommend it, and an ageing finger of a ginger as the only floater in evidence.
Last Christmas, you family tree was plastic, it’s meaning clear and dual. The gifts were few. You tell the kids, Santa had misplaced your address, and most probably even the list with their names on it and you make a point of telling them that you wouldn’t even be surprised if their names were not. They were not so good lately, and not just naughty. You were not even surprised they scoffed disbelievingly at what you have just said.
You look down at your hand clutching the other fiercely. You feel you’re sad, sad heart escape out your chest in a deep, deep sigh. Oh, Santa, just this one gift.
Don’t let my small world break, please.
Share your Comments or Reactions
Powered by Facebook Comments
