My New Year’s resolutions

Compared to other times of the year, it is the season of Christmas that needs the most preparation (read: most stressful). I therefore vow to do the following this year:

Get the family recipe for fruitcake from a US-based cousin. No thanks to that fruitcake joke – that there is only this one loaf of fruitcake being passed around because no one wants it and is just being recycled, I never got an honest-to-goodness fruitcake (my all-time Christmas favorite treat!) this year. I guess fruitcake only got a bad name when some enterprising bakers began making those cheap imitations that are all cake (dry – unlike the real one, which is very, very moist) and with little glazed fruits and no walnuts.

My mother’s recipe is one of the best – and mine is not a biased opinion because it is really that good. Actually, it doesn’t really take a baking genius to come up with the best tasting fruitcake. Just don’t do shortcuts and you’re on your way to baking glory. Trouble is, my Mom is ill now and is hardly coherent, but long before she got sick, she passed on the baking duties (and her prized recipes) to a female cousin, who, unfortunately, has become diabetic (it runs on her other side of the family) and has stopped baking. She isn’t getting any younger and doesn’t have kids and so I think I should nag her to pass on the family recipe to anyone who bakes (most preferably within the family) before that is lost forever and go the way of the original Malolos ensaymada.

Move back to Baguio and get out of Greenhills. I was never a Baguio native and I just decided to get a piece of property there and live in the City of Pines at the height of my depression in 2001. I spent my best New Year’s Eve there – my quietest – because hardly anyone lit up firecrackers (I suspect only those Manileños taking a vacation there did that). What they had to welcome the new year were gongs – and it was such a relief to listen to these native musical instruments instead of the noisy firecrackers that also pollute the air.

Unfortunately, travel time to Baguio has become so long because of traffic and my life and work are in Metro Manila and I have to contend with Greenhills traffic every day and I dread this early the coming of Yuletide 2007 because of the tiangges there.

I do understand how traffic can get bad before Christmas in Greenhills. But the day after Christmas, it took me 45 minutes just to get to the corner of EDSA-Annapolis. At one point, I had to get out of the car to direct traffic (the baranggay people had their hands full at the corner of Annapolis and Missouri) and the talented standup comic Chokoleit suddenly called up to thank me for my review of his ZsaZsa Zaturnnah performance and I had to hang up. If you are reading this, Chokoleit, I apologize for that and hope you understand.

What is difficult to understand, however, is how people can never run out of things to buy in those stalls in Greenhills? They were still at it the day after Christmas and that entire area was just plain bedlam.

Appeal to movie producers to finish their film festival entries as early as November. So that people who have to review these (the judges and the people who sit in the MTRCB and Cinema Evaluation Board) are not harassed because they have to sit through three films in one day (my record is six movies in one day) and get caught in the Christmas rush just so they’d be able to fulfill their duties.

No, I will not even wish for the film festival to be moved to another season because the local movie industry fought for that – and is still fighting for it since distributors of Hollywood flicks have long been lusting after the Christmas playdate because that’s when everyone has extra money for movie fare.

What I wish for is for everyone to have his film product ready at least a month before so that Regal doesn’t have to go through the same problem again: They didn’t have enough prints of Mano Po 5 and ZsaZsa Zaturnnah ready on opening day.

The only problem with that is that copies of filmfest entries may just surface in Quiapo even before the traditional dawn Masses begin – or even earlier because of piracy.

Stop doing my Christmas shopping in March. Rosa Rosal had always told me to do my Christmas shopping as early as October. Last year, I tried to beat her record by doing it in March – to my regret. When it was time to bring out the stuff, everything was dusty (even if these were wrapped in plastic) and the ribbons all flat. Everything had to be re-wrapped. So it’s going to be October shopping for me this year.

Start a campaign among businessmen to stop making money out of the holiday season. Is that actually possible? I used to blame Melchor, Gaspar and Balthazar – collectively known as The Three Kings – for the practice of gift-giving which started all that holiday stress. But businessmen are businessmen and they’ll find a way to rip us all out of our hard-earned money when we have the money – which is the Christmas season because of the 13th month pay and those holiday bonuses.

Never mind if those businessmen from another country that doesn’t even observe Christmas sell us Christmas lights that turn out to be defective that result in fires. And now we’ve lost the real spirit of Christmas – Christ Himself – because we’re all agog over preparations for this now very commercialized season of the year.

Oh well, we survived another year – and another stressful Yuletide season. Do I sound like I’m griping so early in the year? Actually, I just wanted to get that off my chest so I could move on to 2007. Happy New Year to everyone!