Christmas video advertisements are among my favorite parts of the Christmas season. Profit-oriented and affect-driven, yes, but they are, for the most part, well-produced, glimmering, gorgeous, and yes, tear-jerking. The holidays, it seems, pulls out all the stops, and the best-written storylines are given the magnificent productions, complete with shining lights and orchestral music.
As varied as the ads can be – from the elegant ads of luxury brands to the ABS-CBN station ID’s that herald the start of our Christmas season – there is the common and solidly ingrained sentiment that Christmas means family and family means coming home. After all, there are many Christmas ads featuring overseas Filipino workers finding their way home or if not, finding family and by extension a semblance of true Christmas elsewhere. Even in the Western context, the most heartfelt and possibly the saddest mainstream Christmas song speaks about “be[ing] home for Christmas,” supposedly from the point of view of a soldier stationed overseas who longs to be home; a plotline that has formed the staple scene of the war film genre.
The narrative of the Christmas – in its iteration as a large-scale holiday, not as a holy day – is a narrative of home, belonging, and family. Like the notion of “narrative” itself, it is manufactured over time through enforced traditions, institutions like education that mandate “holidays,” and as it had been over the last century or so, capitalism and consumerism. Family bonds and “home” are themselves created fictions, fragile and malleable through time and across cultures. Cynics will point out that the traditional notion of family is always confusing and sometimes torturously impossible. Christmas, family, and home are apparently functional and functioning constructs, but constructs nonetheless.
Yet more than being functional and functioning, these fictions are impossibly necessary. For all the underpinning ideologies, Christmas is the holiday, more than any other holiday, that emphasizes completeness and togetherness, even love in all its sorts. At least for the Western world, it is the holiday that is predicated on generosity and decency. It is the holiday that calls for coming “home,” wherever “home” is, as long as it is the place and importantly, the people, where there is love, understanding, and maybe a bit of joy.
There are, indeed, worse constructs to live with. This year has been difficult. Change has been coming and it has not often been the good change. There are still children dying in war-torn Syria. The United States has a racist, sexist, and dangerously problematic man for president. There will be individuals with no families, and families with no home for Christmas. If Christmas – brief, laden with commercial profit-making and enforced notions of family, home, and love – can suspend the terror and uncertainty of 2016 for one moment of quiet and civility, then it will be more than enough.
So pull the snowmen and reindeer décor out, unrealistic to this tropical land as they may be. Head to the malls to bask in the impractically expensive Christmas lights. And cozy up with a few good Christmas films and ads and feelings and tears in the best place to be: home, wherever it is and with whoever it is.
