FN Blog - Seven heads are better than one!

It doesn’t happen often, but I love it when a lot of my relatives are in town, and we’re just one big, wonderfully rowdy bunch. Some of my best Christmas memories involve my relatives on my mother’s side—all of my mom’s four siblings and their kids would be in the country, we’d hear mass, then have noche buena at my tito’s house.

It’s been years since my US-based cousins last came home, and I miss the days just jam-packed with activities and togetherness. One year, we all went to the beach which, to me, was pretty cold; my cousins, on the other hand, were glad to get away from snow, relishing the “warmer” weather. We took a few pictures (this, after all, was the age of film, so taking a 1G memory card’s worth of pictures was out of the question), a couple of which are stuck on the wall above the mirror in my room.

Another year, we had a particularly fun father’s-side family reunion. One of the games involved each family picking a folded-up piece of paper from a box. On it was written a certain emotion or quality which we had to convey through our own version of “Jingle Bells.” My family got the piece of paper bearing “angry,” and I’ll never forget my brother’s face screwed up in laughter as my dad “fumingly” sang the Christmas ditty. The winner, however, was the mother-daughter tandem that picked “crazy.” I’m cracking up as I type, remembering how we had two Sisa impersonators gamely singing in the middle of the living room! It’s an awesome feeling when you’re laughing so hard that you can barely breathe.

Our Christmases have gotten quieter over the years, with people growing up, cousins starting their own families, and one of my brothers moving away. So if there’s anything I want for Christmas, it is perhaps a repeat of Christmases past—just recapturing the noise and the laughter and the closeness, and the sheer number of loved ones around. I miss it. But our own little family is growing—with my other brother having more kids, and me eventually having my own. So it’s only a matter of time before I have that noisy, messy, crowded Christmas again. Just the way I like it.