Merry merry Christmas, everybody! After 2 Christmases spent in China (2015) and Egypt (2016), I am finally able to spend Christmas in my adoptive city of Dubai. Over the past few years, I have had several Christmas “epiphanies,” if you will: different experiences, different joys and even disappointments in the quote-and-quote most wonderful time of the year. This blog is a brief chronicle of my search for the true meaning of this holiday season. The best Christmases I could remember as a child were the Christmases I received Barbie dolls. I remember unwrapping a gift from one of my godmothers to find a Twirling Ballerina Barbie, who could bend her arms and legs and toes just like a real ballerina. I also remember when the first computer-animated Barbie film “Barbie in the Nutcracker” was released, and the Sugarplum Princess doll was the must-have toy that year. By then I was old enough to make life-changing decisions like what I wanted for Christmas. I vaguely remember visiting 2 different toy stores and “comparing” the prices, because that’s what smart “adults” do, right? Years passed, and before I knew it, a complete decade had taken away my grandmother and then my mother and Christmas was never the same again. I was 15 years old, a Christmas wish list had just been posted on my high school junior classroom wall, and I wrote down “Barbie doll.” By then I was too old to still want a Barbie but young enough to believe that a doll would somehow give me back the happy Christmases of my childhood. As luck would have it, my Secret Santa turned out to be a close friend, and she gifted me with a Barbie doll. I was so happy — for 5 minutes. The school bus had not even left the school grounds for Christmas vacation, when an overwhelming emptiness once again began to seep in. That same Christmas, I drained 2 bottles of wine by myself, not exactly alarming had I not been 15. For a brief time, Christmas was alcohol. It brought people together, made them comrades, temporarily made them forget their inhibitions, and there was a perfectly good chance that your no-holds-barred confession would be forgotten in the hangover of the next day. Because it was so easy to access alcohol back home, I could have Christmas every day if I wanted to. In college, I even drank a little to calm my nerves before a major presentation, and it was NBD. Another shift occurred, and this is where I am today. I started to dabble in religion at 18. “Dabble” was the word for my sudden interest in my otherwise taken-for-granted religion of Roman Catholicism. I attended a Christmas retreat and “returned” to the basic meaning of Christmas. Not Barbie dolls, not alcohol, but Christ. I wonder why it took me so long to connect the dots, when Christmas had always been spelled with “Christ.” Maybe it had to do with my parents’ well-meant but misleading Christmas celebrations of food, gifts, and plenty, with little to no emphasis of religion apart from displaying a nativity set under the Christmas tree, which even then, the Baby Jesus was easy to overlook amidst the large boxes of presents. When the gifts ran dry, when no mother was there to set up the tree, the illusion of the overtly materialistic Christmas began to show, first a crack in the mirror, before everything shattered to a million pieces. It took me many Christmases to discover what was right there in front of me: that Christ is the meaning of Christmas. This year, I neither wrapped nor unwrapped Christmas gifts, but instead went to church for the 9-day Simbang Gabi celebrations.
What I learned from the series of advent-themed homilies was that being away from home on Christmas is not an anomaly, because Jesus, Mary, and Joseph themselves spent their first Christmas away from home. They were in Bethlehem, not Nazareth. They were even refugees in Egypt for a brief uncertain time. Finding ourselves in less than ideal situations (away from home, facing money problems, etc. etc.) on Christmas should not be a hindrance to celebrating Christmas, because Christmas is not just about being at home surrounded by friends and family and food and gifts and whatever else superficiality and ostentation this materialistic world is shoving down our throats. Christmas is Christ. So long as you have Christ, you can have a merry merry Christmas anywhere and at any given circumstance in the world. Have a Christ-filled Christmas, everybody!
