All Things Christmas

When I was a child, we’d usher in Christmas with our very own, carefully chosen soundtrack. We’d have the Christmas classics: we’d dig out our parents’ dusty Ray Conniff cassette tape from our pile of other dusty cassette tapes and listen to Mr. Conniff sing about silver bells and white Christmases and Rudolph the red nosed reindeer who would go down in history.

When I was a little older, thanks to my baby sister Kai, we discovered Alvin and the Chipmunks and Christmas was greeted by Alvin, Simon and Theodore singing about wanting a plane that loops the loop and a hula hoop and playing Christmas won’t be late because they can hardly stand the wait.

A few years after that, my siblings and I discovered CDs and learned to appreciate Jose Mari Chan’s smooth ballads, thanks, in a way, to Gretchen Barretto and Seiko Films for making his song “Beautiful Girl” even more popular that it already was. My real introduction to Mr. Chan was via the song “Constant Change,” which my batchmates and I sang, teary-eyed, during our grade school graduation ceremony.

The album Christmas in our Hearts, which was released in 1990, remains to be my favorite Christmas album ever. Eighteen years later, it still captures the essence of the Filipino Christmas, if you ask me. My favorite: “Mary’s Boy Child.”

In the recent years, I’ve been ushering in Christmas with movies. I’m more visual than I am auditory, so I always go for memorable stories that capture what Christmas should be for me. To date, I have three films that I feel like watching whenever last of the –ber months roll in: Love, Actually (2003), The Holiday (2006), and the nth incarnation of Shake, Rattle and Roll! I’m only half-serious about the last one—and that’s because Christmas Day also means Manila Film Festival to me. The third film is Home Alone (1990), actually.

Love, Actually is magical in that everybody, even the semi-antagonists, gets their happy ending. It’s also magical because each year, I resonate with a different story. This year, I resonate with Natalie (Martine McCutcheon), the “chubby” girl who bagged the British Prime Minister (Hugh Grant). I’m crossing my fingers for an equally fabulous love story that’s so worth the wait in 2009.

I caught The Holiday on cable television much recently and was, once again, drawn into its whimsical love stories: lovelorn girls (Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz) trade houses over Christmas and find love in equally lovelorn boys (Jack Black and Jude Law). It’s all about meet cutes and love and well, happy, happy fluff—stuff you’d want to have for yourself, more so because it’s Christmas.

As for Home Alone, apart from being the landmark film of the cuteness that was Macaulay Culkin, this film somehow comforts me that no matter how naughty you are, and no matter how much you’ve messed up your Christmas—or your life, for that matter—God and your parents will somehow manage to find their way to you.

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