I'M WAITING again. Not in line this time, but in a comfortable air conditioned room with a large flat screen tv in front of me. The room is artful, decorated in shades of mocha and silver. On the center table, tiny teddy bears with Santa hats are carelessly strewn on a candy holder. Beside this arrangement is a pile of travel magazines.
I sigh. Christmas songs have been playing nonstop since I've been here. Chiara says it's like a form of torture. Somehow it does seem so. I've been hearing these songs in almost all the business establishments I've been to. Since September this year. Every September until December. Of every year. For the past how many decades.
The songs make me nostalgic, remind me of gifts and happy Christmases, and funny Christmases, and of one particular Christmas when I was about 6 years old. We were new in the neighborhood, and had just begun building friendships with kids my age and my sibling's ages.
That year, our age group decided to go caroling. I think there were about 5 of us, including my younger sister Jean.
So off we went, and the people in the houses gave us money except for those in one house. We were then in a different street from our place, where the houses were bigger, and their frontages were more heavily decorated with Christmas lights.
Some of those we had sang to previously gave us 25 centavos, 10 centavos, 5 centavos. Mind you, in those days, a bottle of coke was less than 15 centavos. And 5 centavos could buy you a lot of candy.
Back to that last house. It was a large one with a Christmas wreath on their screen door. I remember it had a fireplace at the side.
We must have sang our practiced medley more than 5 times, but no one made an appearance. We could hear movement inside the house. But they were deliberately ignoring us. And young as we were, we got the message.
So we left, feeling bad. I didn't know yet how to identify how I felt then, but now I know I felt cheated that time. On Christmas season. We had sang our hearts out, and the people in that large house with the wreath and the fireplace had carelessly broken them. Hahaha. By not giving us a few coins.
But it was more than that. For eager young kids just getting to grasp the concept of Santa and the season of giving and being merry, getting ignored after belting Christmas carols no matter how out of tune we may have been is not the model way to be treated by adults. They could have probably just told us to go home, but letting us sing our throats hoarse was mean.
The next year, we were going caroling again, determined to ignore the large house with the wreath and the fireplace.
There was no need. One of the typhoons of that year must have caused a landslide, and that house fell. All that was left was a small pond beside a fireplace.
Chiara texts me she's done with her eyebrows retouch. She's always had a difficulty shaping her own, so she has them done once every four months
My thoughts fall to eyebrows. It's amazing how their shape can alter one's facial expression, or add softness or elegance to one's face. Eyebrow shaping has spawned an industry, and there are scores of sites and posts, some quite humorous, about them.
Did you know that in face Feng Shui, gullibility can be gauged by the space between one's eyebrows? Aa says that unibrows can mean blockages. Scars around the brow area can depict a traumatic event at some point in one's life. Moles around the eyebrows, depending on where they are on the face, can mean intelligence, or hidden talents.
I'll probably cover moles in another article.
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