Okay, I have procrastinated long enough. I have repeatedly told myself I’d write a little something about Christmas and the New Year festivities until I looked at the calendar today and realized it’s already the 7th of January. The festive spirit is gone and we’re back to the daily grind (sigh) but I’ll try to summon memories of the recent holidays.
First, an update on last-minute shopping: People, never take the route I took! I was a little hopeful that the rest of mankind had anticipated the shopping rush and vowed to stay out of the malls on Dec. 24 to make way for us, the lazy herd. Wrong. Being stuck in the mall for four hours and fighting for a grocery cart weren’t fun at all. Oh yeah, because I am so brilliant in strategic planning, I ended up lining outside an ATM for close to an hour. My brother, who accompanied me in that shopping trip, was in a foul mood. I was in a foul mood. So much for Christmas spirit.
We split the list to save time and I believe we ended up picking the first item of its kind we saw on the racks. By the time we got home, the last thing I wanted to do was celebrate. Sleep, not meeting Santa Claus, was what I wanted for Christmas. But in keeping with Filipino traditions, everyone had to be at the dining table for the Noche Buena and stay awake to witness the kids jump up and down as they open their gifts. I guess surviving the stampede at the mall was worth it.
I don’t think I was very good in following traditions either. I remember going to only four of nine Misa de Gallo (dawn masses) prior to Christmas. I rewrote the time-honored New Year ritual of buying 13 different kinds of fruits in round shape (for year-round good luck, they say). At the mall on New Year’s eve – a rerun of the Christmas grocery shopping madness:
Me: How many fruits again?
Mother: 13.
Me: I thought it was 12.
Mother: No, it’s 13.
Me: Oh. 13 round fruits, right? Not 13 different round-shaped fruits…
Mother: No. It must be 13 different kinds of fruits.
Me: What?! (Insert curses in dialect) Let’s just buy four apples, four oranges, some pears, and a cluster of grapes. That’s it!
Mother: But…
Her protestations are drowned by my reasoning that, no, we cannot spend the whole afternoon looking for those 13 darn fruits.
So New Year came. With a bang. Make that a series of deafening explosions. Us Filipinos are known for welcoming the New Year with a blast – literally. Firecrackers, makeshift cannons, guns, name it. They say the deadly fireworks display by midnight is meant to drive evil spirits away. I wonder how many people lost their fingers this year though.