It’s the second week of December. Are you done with your shopping yet? I had to brave the crowds with a friend Jenny last weekend, and I barely scratched the surface of my shopping list. It was stress and joy combined, topped with aching feet I didn’t mind so much because I was happy with what I managed to buy. It really is beginning to feel a lot like Christmas, isn’t it?
To continue with the Christmas theme, I’d like to come up with two lists similar to what the friend I went shopping with made: My top ten all-time favorite Christmas songs. Here they are, in no particular order, except for the first one, which I already wrote about last time.
1. Mary’s Boy Child. The version I am familiar with, and the version I love, is Jose Mari Chan’s version. Before discovering Christmas in our Hearts, we only listened to foreign, English language carols that sang of white Christmases, Santa Clause sliding through chimneys, and a reindeer with a red nose.
2. Christmas in our Hearts. While we’re on the subject, Christmas in our Hearts, this time a Chan original, was the first English language carol I heard that captured the feeling of the Filipino Christmas for me. There was no chance I’d hear the popular Tagalog carols at home, my parents both being Visayan.
3. Himig ng Pasko. I’m pretty sure I first heard this song in grade school, during a Christmas program. This song actually captures the feeling of Simbang Gabi for me. When I was a young girl, and my neighborhood friends hadn’t migrated to North America yet, we’d force ourselves to get up at four in the morning to attend the dawn novena masses in pursuit of that Christmas wish. We didn’t have phones yet—that was my village in the late eighties and early nineties for you—so we would call out at each other’s bedroom windows. I don’t think I’ve ever completed Simbang Gabi.
4. Silent Night. This, I consider to be a “literary” song, not only because it began as a poem but because it’s the only Christmas carol that reminds me of not just one, but three creative works: a play and two movies. The one-act play is one of my favorites, Oli Impan (Holy Infant) by Alberto Florentino. It’s about squatters in “Casbah,” Tondo, who were evicted five days before Christmas of 1958 by the Manila Mayor. The story unfolds between two children, five and four years old. The first movie is Love, Actually. It’s played in that scene where Mark surprises his best friend’s wife with a sweet Christmas greeting. The second movie, Silent Night, is a film adaptation of the famous Christmas truce during World War II, where opposing troops sang Silent Night, a carol both sides knew. Read up on it, if you want a real Christmas story.
5. Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas. This song was popularized by Judy Garland in the movie Meet Me in St. Louis and sung by Frank Sinatra, but it’s one of my favorites because I tried to sing it with our little Christmas caroling group in UP Quill, a writing organization I was part of in college. I never sing—and I didn’t turn up on the caroling day itself, as I was stuck in traffic—but hey, it was Christmas and I wanted to be with friends during rehearsal time.
And now, for the real meat of the list: my top ten all-time favorite songs that give me that Christmas feeling.
1. I Finally Found Someone. A duet by Barbra Streisand and Bryan Adams, this song makes me giddy because it’s about, well, finally finding someone—and unabashedly gloating about it!
2. Someday. Sung by Sugar Ray, this is one of my time markers. I was in college when this came out, and I was in love with my close circle of friends to the point of actually wanting to live in a commune with them. That didn’t happen, of course, but I’m in “someday” now, a decade later.
3. Walkin’ on the Sun. This Smash Mouth song is catchy as hell, most of its lines are a bit corny, but it is, as the lyrics say, “a love attack!” Actually, I feel like Christmas when I hear this song because my cousin Joey would play it all the time in her car when we were in college, driving off to places that weren’t, well, school.
4. Bizarre Love Triangle. I relate to the stripped down Frente version better because it pushes the beautiful words of the song into the limelight and because it was popular when I had my first case of puppy love—and for the longest time, I always associated Christmas with romance because it’s everything that comes with it combined.
5. This Never Happened Before. This Paul McCartney song became popular because it came out in the movie The Lake House. I love it because it’s all about that one single moment when you just know you’ve found the one.
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