Holiday feasting

For the past days, especially during Noche Buena and Media Noche, food was teeming on tables. A typical from a usual mealtime, it is a tradition that we want to celebrate Christmas and face the New Year in abundance.

But aside from the bounty, it is also the time when members of the family look forward to be in a table for a sense of cohesiveness-as one happy family. It is the moment when they share happy thoughts. It is also the time to discuss some family issues and concerns that require mutual understanding and consensus.

My family can get together and just sit around and talk a lot — with eating often an afterthought — take out even or something pre-prepared.

Sharing food and conversation around the dinner table makes for happier, healthier families. Dinnertime is family time. That is sacred time. I could be with colleagues all I wanted before or after, but dinnertime was the time that we connect as a family.

Recently, our eating habits have really changed. More than 50 percent of meals are eaten outside of the home.

We're eating more of  our meals out, where we don't have control over what goes into them. We don't have time to make nutritious meals so we eat a lot of processed food. There are a whole lot of factors that have gone into what is now the obesity epidemic. And this is very much true of our son whose health has become a source of concern.

Recent studies have shown that children who eat meals with their families more nights than not have fewer eating disorders, have fewer problems with drugs and alcohol, and are generally happier and well-adjusted children. This isn't surprising. There's enormous amount of education that goes on at the dinner table. The family meal is an incredibly important social institution. This is where we civilize our children. This is where our children learn the art of conversation. This is where we exchange the news of the day.

Corollary to this, it also shows that if you sit down and have a meal at home with friends and family, there are a number of  social outcomes. Number one, you're more likely to eat a more nutritious meal. Number two, you have far more control over what goes into that meal. Then, on top of the nutritional benefits, there's camaraderie and the family bonding that goes into sitting down and talking about your day over dinner in the evening. Children do better. The whole family does better.

The lavishness of the celebration, we know that there are still others who have nothing. That even on those feasts would find it hard differentiating from their usual days.

As visualized in a different meal gathering of Joey Velasco's painting "Hapag ng Pag-asa," a painting that shows Jesus Christ breaking bread with real street children from Manila instead of apostles like in the Last Supper. The artist used the 12 children in the painting. He found them in poor areas of  Metro Manila and Quezon City. After treating them to meals, he took their pictures and retreated to his room to start working on the painting. Velasco said, the children, aged 4-14, reveal a story of a greater hunger than a plate of rice could satisfy.

He said, "It was they who touched my soul. Through them, God spoke to me and moved me to paint their stories and tell others about their lives."

Through his partnership with Gawad Kalinga, an organization dedicated to sheltering the homeless, the 12 children and their families now have homes at Romeo Cabrera Village in Quezon City. Indeed, Mr. Velasco who died of cancer at age 43 is a great artist with a heart that tried to change how life's often viewed.

A feast, or any gathering, hopefully would remind us all that it is not only for the nourishment of one's body but more so for the fortification of the soul.