Christmas past
It still feels like summer! The heat is made worse by the nerve-wracking Christmas traffic rush. Amidst all this frantic holiday hustle and bustle, I can’t help but wax nostalgic about what Christmases were like during my growing-up years.
The weather was more predictable then, with almost clockwork precision. We got a lot of sunshine between March and May, and roads were wet by rains and flooded by typhoons between June and August. By September, we could already feel the cool breeze signaling that the Yuletide was just around the corner. Christmas music would start filling the airwaves during the onset of the “ber” months. Oh yes, what would Christmas be like without the carols? Nights would get colder as December neared, and dawn Masses were the time to display hip sweaters and jackets.
As an altar boy in those days, I looked forward to those dawn Masses. Never mind that I had to wake up earlier than usual to get ready to serve during Holy Mass, and then still have to attend school just a couple of hours after. Assisting our Parish priest gave me an unexplainable joy that I miss and still long to this very day.
My “tour of duty” would start by climbing up our Church belfry to peal the bell at exactly 15 minutes before 4 a.m., a wakeup call to the parishioners of Our Lady of Fatima in Bacood, Sta. Mesa. Soon they would come in droves and leave after the dawn Mass, but not before partaking of native puto-bumbong and bibingka sold by vendors around the Church perimeter.
Our family had just enough to get by, but my mother would not settle for anything but a festive Christmas celebration. As early as November, my father would bring home a Christmas tree — a real one, cut from the finest of pine trees. I never asked him and was never told where he got those trees year after year. And, boy, was our house filled with the sweet scent of pine leaves during the holiday season! Compared with our wealthy neighbors, our family’s Noche Buena was modest, but my mother would always remind us that what mattered most was that we were together to celebrate the birth of Christ.
Ionce read an article written by Paul Hourihan which describes what Christmas is all about. I can’t remember his exact words, but if my memory serves me right, he eloquently said that Christ reminds us of how we are always coming back to ourselves in all our actions, dreams, reveries, and lifetimes. At Christmas we contemplate Christ and end up by contemplating ourselves.
He explains that ‘Thou Art That’ is an aphorism representing the core of the Vedanta philosophy: “Thou art the Being in all beings, the Soul in all souls. Every heart beating is your own heart… therefore Love your neighbor as yourself. The same Divine encloses both of you. The heart of God is yours. The heart of Christ is yours, and not in a figurative sense, but in an actual sense. He belongs to us. He is us.”
Hourihan says that it is in Christ that we see the highest image of what we actually are. He has been called the Savior, but each of us, as well, may be one — prophets, all — on a smaller scale than His, but in principle with no essential difference. He only does on a vast scale what we as spiritual seekers are doing on the stage of our individual lives, burdened as we are with so many conflicts, trials, sufferings, and miseries.
On a lighter note, let me just quote Dean Martin in the Rat Pack’s (Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., Joey Bishop and Peter Lawford) Christmas album: “Leave your worries behind, and if you’re lucky a thief will steal ‘em away.”
From my family to yours: Have a Blessed Christmas!
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