Second Look
For today’s Filipino, Christmas is a season of two faces: on one hand, the traditional customs of simbang gabi, noche buena, and media noche, accented with ensaymada and hamon, and on the other hand, the more “commercialized” Christmas of decked halls, crazy shopping sprees at the mall and a break from all work and stress.
The presence of this more “commercial” Christmas is an attempt to make the season more accessible to the entire world; after all, media covers and reports this face of Christmas a lot more than the other one. However, this does not mean that we have to let our Filipino Christmas traditions take a backseat in our lives, since ingrained in those traditions are lessons that can help make the Christmas experience more meaningful.
Central to the experience of Christmas in the Philippines is having the family together. For example, noche buena is not complete without a family sharing hamon and ensaymada. If one looks at the belen, the depiction of the original Christmas, one can see that it is a display of a family celebrating the gift of being complete. The common denominator in these examples is the desire and effort of people to be together, and this points to the insight that perhaps, beyond the celebration, the true value of Christmas is in putting the sense of “togetherness” at the center of everything. What this sense of togetherness gives is that warm fuzzy feeling of belonging, and no matter how cliché it may sound, this value is nevertheless important to everyone.
I think Christmas can be more meaningful when one is able to integrate the lessons learned from our traditional Filipino celebrations with the multitude of ways the world celebrates the holidays. One such way of doing this is to focus on the value of “experience,” as opposed to just the monetary aspect, when giving gifts. There are ways by which Christmas can be light on the wallet, but heavy on the so-called good vibes; one does not need to overspend in order to share happiness, and anyone who has participated in an outreach activity knows that for such an activity’s beneficiaries, the seemingly “cheap” act of giving up time for them is much more appreciated than impersonal donations.
We can apply this mentality in figuring out gifts for our loved ones by doing things like taking the family photos during the Christmas lunch, organizing a movie date for the barkada, or offering to babysit cousins for one Sunday afternoon. The list of alternative ways of gift-giving is endless, but the common thing that ties the options together is that they allow everyone to feel that sense of togetherness without necessarily being expensive. You cannot go wrong with these things if you want to feel GV, either.
This holiday season, one thing to take into consideration is that there are many ways to celebrate Christmas, but at the core of the Filipino celebration, what matters more than gift-giving is the experience of being together with the people you love.
Merry Christmas, and enjoy the holiday season, guys!
