A 1960s Christmas greeting to you all
I belong to Christmases where kids only had two ninongs, or ninangs, as the case may be. There was one ninong for baptism, and another for confirmation. And that was it. My baptismal ninong passed on before I was old enough to understand that making "amen" or kissing the hand of a ninong resulted in something special on Christmas. So I grew through several Christmases with my childhood fortunes largely dependent on the fortunes of my surviving ninong.
At a time when the peso-dollar exchange rate was two pesos to the dollar, an "amen" that produced a crisp five peso bill must have meant a particularly good year for my one and only ninong. If it was just a peso coin, then it must have been a bit hard for him. But we did not know what life struggles that peso saw through before it ended in an act of benevolence. And not that we cared.
In the Christmases that I belonged to, when candies were still a treat, and sold for one centavo apiece, a peso was a real treasure indeed. Today, a peso cannot even buy posporo. But that is another story. Today is a good day for reminiscing, not because I am feeling sentimental or foolish, but because reminiscing makes me feel good, about times when good really meant great.
I do not wish to take away the joys of the generations that followed. Each has its own highs, and as a father with youngish daughters who cannot imagine Christmas, or even life itself, without malls and gadgets and Facebook, I would be the last person to deny them their own ideas on how to get a big kick out of their own experiences.
But I do long for my Christmases. I remember the dawn Masses when you wake up to the church bells, not to the cellphone alarm. I remember touching the leaves of bushes wet from the dew as they line the church compound, not the cold steel of parked cars. I remember the thick chocolate gurgling in the baterol, sweetened by real muscovado sugar, being awaited by the puto or budbud on the wooden table.
There was a real warmth and hominess in the smell of these simple treats that I miss over the coffee and donuts, that in other times would be great and even necessary, but just not Christmasy enough for Christmas. When the puto and budbud became too much for nine days straight, there was the good old staple pan de sal, when they were truly pan de sal -- meaning they were truly bread with a hint of salt (sal) in them, not today's pan de sal that is sweetened.
The pan de sal, which sold for five pieces for 20 centavos, or seven for 25, you simply dunked into the sikwate. Cheese, butter or preserves were not everyday luxuries. Sometimes a real breakfast awaited at the end of the chilly trudge home from church, depending on what happened at supper the night before. If there were some rice leftovers, that meant a special treat of fried rice, great to go with buwad danggit and inun-unang isda, and sometimes with fried or scrambled eggs.
There would be lulls after that, lulls that were soothed every now and then by small talk. Television had not yet intruded into our homes then. The lulls allowed everyone to drift off to what they were supposed to do the rest of the day. For me, it was either go back to bed or dive right into the boy's life that awaited every Christmas vacation.
Often the first order of the day was to warm up the lantaka for the firing later that night. The heat from the previous night, intense enough to burn skin on prolonged touch, had given way to the cold chill of dawn. Cold lantakas take some time to fire, and it takes repeated huffing and puffing into the hole and dipping a stick into the gaas in the hollowed bamboo and lighting it from a lamp to dip again that one gets from hollow pfwee of ignition failure to a real humdinger of a bang.
Sometimes we use calburo instead of gaas but it often causes the bamboo to break and our ears to go temporarily deaf. Anyway, having sufficiently warmed and primed our bamboo cannons, we moved to other things that seemed so important to us, like play. Play was not a button to push in some gadget. Play was serious business. If a particular play involved climbing trees, you learned to use strength, skill, and judgment.
Most especially, play was a challenge. It motivated us to outdo one another but softened us at the same time around the edges, so that a playmate is really a friend, one you look after and who you expect to watch after you. Play meant mutual respect. And even if we did not understand these things at the time, and thought we were just playing, I know now we were men in the making. We were building communities one boy at a time, responsibilities one play at a time.
When we went caroling, it was bad manners to stop singing even after the coins were already given. We held the song to the very end. And when we sang, we sang with our hearts knowing we were singing. We gave each tune our very souls because caroling was serious business -- we sang only to people we knew. There was none of the random singing just for the sake of what will be given. There was none of the abrupt ending in mid-song at the giving of something.
And Santa Claus was real in our Christmases. When the stockings went up, they went up with all innocent longing. To those who did not have what it takes to believe in Santa Claus, Christmas for its own sake was enough. One of the best joys I always cherish was when, on Christmas day, my mother would send me with bowls of humba to the neighbors for whom Santa Claus meant a warm meal of mais kan-on and my humba. No ham then. Just Christmas.
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