Lost Christmas - WHY AND WHY NOT By Nelson A. Navarro

One good friend’s idea of Christmas comes down to the humble batidor or pig-iron chocolate maker, the one with the hand-made wooden twirler. "Now you know what will make me absolutely happy this season," she says by way of soliciting the one gift her yuppie income and shopping skills cannot seem to flush out of obsolescence in this new Millennium.

It’s as if I dropped a satchel-full of coins on this jukebox of a Makati lady because in no time at all she’s rattling all about the promdi celebrations she once savored to the gills, but which today’s young people, she sadly notes, are condemned never to know. Not now, not ever.

"That batidor and the way Mother made native chocolate I will never forget," she says the late Aling Etang of Calamba who, I was reminded, had just moved on to the next and kinder world a scant few months ago.

All I can tell my dear friend is that I’ll be on the lookout for this precious relic of her lost youth next time I run into some junk or antique shop or undertake a pilgrimage to this benighted province or that.

Mila’s long perorations of holidays past and long-ago family festivities seem the perfect antidotes to Erap-bashing and impeachment blues. She can’t resist putting her two-cents’ worth on the Jose Velarde signature being "very clearly" the same as President Estrada’s. But since we’re in violent agreement on that and most other exasperating points raised by the never-ending trial, she quickly shifts back to more pleasant stuff.

Nothing can be more refreshing and stress-free than talking of the good old days when Christmas was, in our aging and biased eyes, far more heartfelt and infinitely less commercial than it has become in the Estrada era. There were no Megamalls and Gloriettas, much less Power Plants when we were growing up in the 1950s. Our celebrations, Mila in nearby Calamba and mine in deep Mindanao, were strictly rustic and home-based, except for the rare forays to Manila to see, for instance, the bright lights of Escolta or, much later, the moving tableaus of the COD Department Store in Cubao.

Anywhere out of Manila was then deemed promdi country. TV was in its infant stage and Henry Sy was still selling cheap step-ins in Carriedo. Whether it was buntings or food, we went for the local and the homemade.

Take those lanterns we loved to hang outside our windows. As early as September, our Practical Arts teacher would be hounding us to bring bamboo, Japanese paper and starch to put our individual projects together. Never nimble with my hands, I always turned out the ugliest lantern, the one that would go up in flames as soon as I lit the candle inside.

Because our remote but civilized mountain town was literally surrounded by pine trees and always reeked with pine-scent on foggy mornings, we were ahead in the Christmas fantasy division. Malaybalay was the proud Baguio of the South and never more so than in December.

Mom bought her ham early from Cagayan so there would be time to cure it. As we were growing up, we switched to Del Monte ham, which was pioneered by the wife of the golfer Celestino Tugot. We would endure the long drives to Camp Phillips for regular suppliers of pineapple-flavored ham and bacon long before it became available commercially as Cagayan ham.

California grapes and nuts as well as American chocolates and Dutch cheese were, of course, supplied by Namarco, the state-run grocery outlet. We were never in want because Dad was the town dentist and every Chinaman who owned a store sent us a box or two of these goodies. A flood of cakes from chiffons to upside-downs to gingerbread and those studded with M&Ms always came from the agricultural college in Musuan where the academic wives spent all their time baking – and all year-round, too.

The town’s two bakeries only turned out pan de sal and rock-hard peasant biscuits. Goldilock’s, Red Ribbon and Dunkin’ Donuts were decades away. If you wanted good stuff, your Mom or old-maid aunt had to make them. Maids only cleaned and washed. That’s what separated good Moms from, well, bad Moms. Ours turned out the best bibingkang kanin, meat empanadas and polvoron, which she concocted out of the UNICEF milk rations we brought home from school everyday.

Our very practical parents never gave toys. Each child got a new set of clothes and shoes. The boys trooped over to De La Cruz Tailoring; Mom and my sister had to see their seamstress. For the boys, it was Ang Tibay or Esco, and for our sister, Gregg’s – all flown in from Manila on the PAL-DC3.

And, yes, we kids earned extra money caroling around the neighborhood. This was guaranteed income because we "victimized" each other’s family. But there was this tightwad of on old woman who never gave. Children can be mean, of course, and we had a special song for her, who was rather lame and walked funny. This would never fail to bring her out of the house and to chase us laughing all the way to the banana groves nearby. What sticks in my shamelessly nostalgic mind, though, is how we always fervently sang "O Holy Night" and, I believe, really meant in all our promdi innocence, very single word of that unforgettable melody.

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Nelson A. Navarro's e-mail address: [email protected]