FN Blog - Seven heads are better than one!

When I was a little girl, September always marked the countdown to that part of the year where it was just a magical bonanza of festivities: watching the mechanical puppet show at C.O.D. while propped on my dad’s shoulders, driving down the Christmas-light-studded avenues of cosmopolitan Makati, post-bedtime visits to the carnival (it was Big Bang, Fiesta Carnival, and Star City during my days of yore), dessert coma during Noche Buena, and, the morning after, opening gifts from Santa and Superman (which, if I had looked closer, all bore torn Landmark price tags).

But the problem with 28 years’ worth of Christmas hype (or hype of any kind, for that matter) is that it gets old. I think my holiday spark started losing luster when I graduated from college and started working: when I no longer had weeks’ worth of Christmas break, when the fury caused by shoppers’ traffic became hell’s best recruitment tactic, and when I had my own salary to actually buy gifts with.

The last part was fine, actually, for the first two years. Then the whole business of Christmas went on a chaotic downward spiral from then on: there were bills to pay, choosing gifts for your closest and dearest (because I really wanted to do better than scented candles or incense sticks…), swimming upstream the mad exodus of Philippine shoppers just to get to the office, work deadlines, and the fact that giving out sequinned, hand-drawn Christmas cards just doesn’t work at 22 the same way it did when I was eight.

This year, I’m thinking of a new self-imposed Christmas executive order, because if this goes on any further, I’ll officially be a she-Scrooge by the time I hit 30—and, um, how do I say this, AYOKO.

The new self-imposed order is this: “Birthday ni Jesus, bawal mangarag!”

I think I’ll swipe my credit card for a family Christmas trip to some uncommercialized beach…Bohol maybe…where Noche Buena will be wine, cheese, and lots of chocolate; where our gifts to one another can be a nice seashore massage and a spanking new tan; where midnight mass is midnight mass, not another parking problem; and where we can get sloshed and laugh under a star-spangled sky. I think this Christmas, I’m just gonna gun for actually having a good time. So to all my closest and dearest on my gift list, sequinned, hand-drawn cards it is!