A PetiX Life

To be far away from home is perhaps one of the hardest struggles that a Filipino overseas worker must face. To be away on Christmas, is much harder. Arriving in the US a few months before Christmas, I wondered what it was like celebrating the season in a foreign land, away for the first time from family and friends back home in the Philippines. I knew from stories of relatives and friends that Christmas in the US wasn’t the same as what we have in the islands, but I still felt some excitement as Christmas drew near since it was, of course, my first here. My uncles and aunties, who’ve been away from our country for a much longer time, had told me about how Christmas was celebrated in a different way in North America–that celebrations were much "quieter" here than in our third-world nation. But not until I was separated from my loved ones and experienced my first American Christmas, did I fully comprehend what Christmas truly meant to Filipinos.

Filipinos who are in the US usually tell folks back home that Christmas comes and goes like any ordinary day. To be fair, that’s not exactly accurate. Americans do celebrate Christmas, too. They bring out the tree, decorate it with bright lights and shiny trimmings, and flood it with gifts– some of which were bought as early as November during the Thanksgiving Sale. Some even put lights that snake around the entire house, much like what we do back in the homeland. There were parties, too.

Filipinos here try to do as much as they can to celebrate Christmas in the same way that they do in the Philippines. In the Filipino church that I go to, we had our own Simbang Gabi, although it was shorter by 12 days. We sang Christmas carols, exchanged gifts, and laid out a feast of Filipino food, including the lechon, pinakbet, adobo, lumpiang shanghai, and all the pancit you can eat. It was a feast that could’ve fed an entire barangay back home and still had plenty left to give each one a take-away bag.

Christmas at our house here in LA, where I stay with my relatives, was very much the same back home. There were presents and food–the traditional Christmas ham was roasted perfectly in the oven; and what Filipino Christmas would be complete without the videoke machine? We sang to our hearts delight naturally like any true Filipino would.

Inside our house, if I closed my eyes, I could feel the same warmth of Christmas as though I was back home, but the moment I stepped outside, there was hardly anything that would tell me that it was Christmas time. Except for a handful of houses (which were mostly Filipino-owned homes), there were no Christmas lights and parols that blink and chime throughout the night and could light up an entire archipelago; there were no children knocking on doors and singing their own versions of Jingle Bells and Ang Pasko Ay Sumapit in the most incongruous melodies and highly improvised lyrics–the same children who repeatively go back to your house and pretend they weren’t there just minutes ago by disguising their voices or changing their clothes; there were no neighbors who played the same Christmas song over and over until you could hear it playing in your sleep; there were no Christmas carols blasting out of radios that played so loud you could hardly hear your own thoughts; there was no mad rush at the mall the kind we have back home where every corner and every nook of every shopping center was filled with holiday shoppers; there were neither lanterns nor banners hanging on street posts to show that Christmas has come: the streets were bare; and lastly, Christmas passed in the US literally without fireworks.

The last one I missed the most. In the thirty years of my life, there were always firecrackers and fireworks during Christmas and especially during the New Year celebrations. Fireworks–whether it was a simple "fountain" or the extravagant fireworks display arranged by the rich Chinese family in the local community–usually served as a high point in the holiday celebrations for Filipinos. Here in the US, there were no children playing lusis; there were no teenagers making bamboo canons; and there were no adults playing with firecrackers like children. (Of course, there was no one here getting their fingers blasted by a misfiring bawang or superlolo, but the number of firecraker victims in our country is steadily declining.)

Christmas and New Year passed quietly here where I’m trying to build a second home. I’ve just had my first taste of Christmas in this foreign land and it has made me appreciate more the little things that make up our celebrations back in the islands. Being so many miles away has made me realize what makes the season a truly special time for Filipinos. Unlike here in the US, Christmas unites our entire country in joyous celebration and there is a party atmosphere everythere. Everybody is singing the same holiday songs and everyone has the same goal: to celebrate the birth of Jesus in whatever means available. It didn’t matter if there was food prepared in the family table, Christmas cheer was free and everyone was invited to party. Despite the hardships throughout the year, everyone is either cheerful or ready to cheer up others. The "sounds of Christmas" echoes across the country and that’s what makes a world of difference.