Don’t give biscuits for Christmas

I am a poor man. When I give Christmas gifts, they reflect my lowly station in life. But thank God poverty has not impaired my sense of taste. Thus, poor as I am, I do not recall having ever given biscuits as a Christmas gift.

Biscuits, I just learned, are not a good thing to give as a Christmas gift. Biscuits given as a Christmas gift can be so offensive and distasteful that when Miriam Defensor Santiago gave some to Juan Ponce Enrile, he sent them back to the giver.

 Money is a better Christmas gift. When Enrile gave senators Christmas gifts consisting of money, they quickly pocketed them. They were so happy with the money they did not even bother to return the biscuits that Santiago presumably gifted them as well for Christmas.

 As far as I know, nobody complains about money as a Christmas gift, not even if the gifts are not in the same amounts for everybody. The only person I know of who complained, not about the money but of the uneven amount, was Antonio Trillanes. But he complains about everything.

 One thing about money as a Christmas gift is that nobody breathes a word about it. There is something eerily surreptitious about money that you notice when you give it as a gift for Christmas — the person you give it to quickly pockets it as if afraid the sun would melt it.

 Money is not the same as, say, a new pair of shoes. A new pair of shoes you promptly show off to your friends. It is not the same either as a new shirt. A new shirt, especially if it is expensive, you promptly wear to Mass.

 But not money. This is why even long after Christmas, no one among the senators who received his or her gift from Enrile ever talked openly about it. It was only when the media got wind of the windfall that everybody started looking around at everybody else in the Senate.

 Eventually their eyes fell on Santiago. Santiago, it turned out, was the only person in the world who returned money given as a Christmas gift. But even Santiago admitted returning the money only because Enrile returned her biscuits.

 So, the greater challenge that lies before us to learn from is not whether money is as evil as some people say it is, but whether biscuits are truly as good as some people purport them to be.

 Remember that when the senators accepted their Christmas gifts of money from Enrile, they promptly passed them on to their constituents in the form of more projects, or so they now claim after the media expose.

 So blessed is a Christmas gift of money that only noble things can arise from their spending. Without Enrile’s Christmas gift of money, who knows how bleak Christmas would be for the chosen beneficiaries of the senators.

 In fact, so contagious is the Christmas spirit inspired by gifts of money that the House of Representatives, even without public bidding (in whatever sense you understand the phrase), made a clean breast and admitted that congressmen, too, enjoyed what the senators did.

 Thus, by the same token, constituencies the length and breadth of the nation all became pleasantly surprised beneficiaries of the practice of Christmas gift-giving with money. Everyone seems to prefer it this way. Everyone, that is, except Santiago, who prefers biscuits.

 Come to think of it, even priests would probably prefer money as a gift, not just for Christmas but for any and all occasions, than all those baskets of fruits that we never seem to tire giving them.

 Maybe priests are just too shy to complain, but imagine yourself a priest confronted with a line of people stretching all the way to the back, each one bearing a basket of fruit that you have to pretend to like.

 Money, I think, is a more straightforward substitute. It is more flexible for the priest’s many needs. If a priest craves for fruit, he can always buy some with the money. Why, he can even buy biscuits for Enrile. Who knows, he might return it with a belated Christmas gift.