The magic of Christmas

How was Christmas like during the Yeah, Yeah Vonnel generation compared to today’s dot.com gen? Basically, the same spirit of merry making, preparations, jubilation and celebration.

As kids of the rolling ’50s and the fabulous ’60s, we certainly didn’t have the high tech gadgets that our youngsters now are enjoying. Ours were definitely simpler in more ways than one, yet we enjoyed to the max simply because those were the only things available during that time of our youth and we have not much choices then.

1950. 1960. 1970. 1980. 1990. Where were you all these years? Fast Forward to Y2K. Many decades have passed from the time we were kids. The Baby Boomers are now well into their midlife years. We have traveled life’s many journeys. It’s been a long and winding road. We’ve committed mistakes along the way. We have loved and lost. We were confused, we cried some tears, we ran and stumbled, we had bruises. We fell and stood again. We learned our lessons. Oh, we’ve really been through a lot.

All those years gone by, the memories of our dreams, of the way we were and all. Gone but certainly not forgotten because they have been deeply imprinted in the inner recesses of our hearts and minds all these years. They are truly life’s precious moments, and as such, simply unforgettable.

With each Christmas that comes, a bunch of memories is added and deposited into our memory bank. But no matter how many Christmases have passed, the fact still remains that in the eyes of our fellow classmates, family and friends, we will always be Toto, Boy, Jun, Dodong, or Inday, Mary, Lulu, Lenlen of decades past. Nothing has changed except that we have become better persons - as children of God, as working professionals, parents, or as senior citizens.

With each Christmas that comes, we become what we have been - recycled, repackaged, reformulated, renewed - all like children of God, awaiting for His coming, our Lord and our Savior, Jesus Christ, the real reason for the season. There’s still that feeling of excitement, maybe not so much for ourselves now but for our children. As parents, we still make a countdown as to how many more days are there to Christmas, and everything else that spells joy to the world, of the season’s best. In our children, we see a reflection of our youth, of the way we were.

Yes, we still believe in the Magic of Christmas. We will always do because it’s magic whenever we think about the memories of those wonderful Christmases of our beautiful past when we were the noisy and carefree kids of the ‘50s, the reigning teenagers of the jam session era of the ‘60s, the working bunch of yuppies of the ‘70s, the family men and women of the ‘80s, the midlifers of the ‘90s, and now the senior citizens of the new millennium.

It’s magic because no matter how depressed or forlorn we feel because of some seemingly insurmountable problems that beset us, we still manage to smile whenever we hear Christmas songs,  transporting  us back into that era somewhere in time when we were the young and the restless, living in a world that was more peaceful and safe, where there was less of the more - less pollution, less traffic, less violence, and, yes, less responsibilities in life.