In the farming village where I grew up, Christmas was essentially a play of light and singing voices. I lived in a sparse neighborhood that, having no electricity in those days, regularly disappeared after sundown among the thick clusters of trees and shrubs. There would only be small patches of light from kerosene gas lamps or wick lamps in the invisible houses. But when December came, practically all of the village households would hang a parol and I always volunteered to mount a candle inside ours. I would excitedly light it and a faint sheen of red, orange, yellow, blue, or green would break through the crepe paper or cellophane. In less than an hour the candle would consume itself and I would be too exhausted to put up and light a new one. Everyone else would be asleep by then, and the night would be so calm and silent I could hear it pounding on my eardrums.
(http://josecarilloforum.com/imgs/parols-hanging_from-bamboo-grove-1A1.png)
IMAGE CREDIT: KERLYNB.HUBPAGES.COM AT PINTEREST
On Christmas Eve I often stayed awake long past midnight. Our house would be totally dark because our kerosene gas lamp would have sputtered out hours earlier, all of its fuel used up. Only a small wick lamp in our kitchen would stay lit for the rest of the night. At that hour I would feel strangely grateful that there were thousands of stars in the sky. For some reason, I couldn’t remember a single Christmas Eve in those days when there was a full moon or at least substantial moonlight. What I remember were skies that were almost always cloudless, with stars that pulsated and seemed to shiver and swirl and dance in the blackness. I often would imagine that one of them was the Star of Bethlehem. It was in those moments that I felt I got nearest to feeling the sense of the divine, far more profoundly than when praying inside a high-ceilinged church or listening to Christmas songs sung with grace and sensitivity.
What made the season even more magical for me in those days were the Christmas carols. I would feel real goodwill even for the gaggle of children from the neighborhood who would sing Christmas songs in falsetto, banging oval sardine tin cans in accompaniment. But my anticipation was keenest for the caroling groups of the schoolteachers, religious groups, and glee clubs. In those days they would preannounce their coming with elaborate calling cards. At night they would come in formal dress decked with colorful capes and sashes, assembling in front of our house as if in a stage tableau, their faces illumined by the carbide glow of their huge multicolored parols. They would sing Christmas songs beautifully, and at parting time they would invariably oblige us with one or two songs of our choice even if they couldn’t sing them as well, their voices sometimes croaking from exhaustion. After partaking of our finger foods and ginger ale, they would leave for other houses. In bed I would listen to their voices getting fainter and fainter until I could no longer hear them.
All of these images and sounds of my countryside Christmases are just fading memories now. In their place are Christmases that assail the senses with hard-cased lanterns garishly lit by high-wattage lamps, synthetic Christmas trees that need to be assembled from trunk to twig, and young carolers that sing with ever diminishing verve and sincerity from year to year. The primitive magic of Christmas that I had always felt in my youth is gone. Against my better judgment, I have to suspend my disbelief to imagine that at least the spirit of Christmas is still alive—for my children’s sake, and for the sake of the child in me and in you as well.
Merry Christmas!
(This is a condensation of an essay that I wrote for my column in The Manila Times for its December 26, 2002 issue. On Christmas Day today, I am posting it in the Forum to help summon into my consciousness the Christmas spirit that somehow has always lain in deep hibernation inside me since I was a child.)