ONE can say “Merry Christmas” in every language: from the Italian “Buon Natale,” the Spanish “Feliz Navidad," to the Mandarin “Sheng Tan Kuwai Lei.” The problem lies somewhere else: How to say it without gagging.

Does this greeting stick in the craw of our honorable legislators when they greet landless farmers? They just completed the charade of “extending” the agrarian reform law while gutting it by making compliance “voluntary.” Does tycoon Eduardo Cojuangco grit his teeth if he extends, if ever, holiday greetings to farmers victimized by the coconut levy?

Past performance, before the Senate Blue Ribbon committee is a good indicator. “Joc-Joc” Bolante can tell his probers “Maligayang Pasko” without batting an eyelash. Does Ferdinand Marcos Jr. greet tycoon Lucio Tan with the Ilokano “Naimbag a Pascua” without wincing? The Marcoses claim their dictator-patriarch stashed loot with Tan---who vigorously denies it.

Our city councilors, loll in a brand new P138 million legislative building. Would they choke if they told patients crammed, three to a bed, in medicine-short Cebu City Medical Center, “Malipayong Pasko”?

Who of them extend holiday greetings to families of 183 victims of unsolved vigilante killings? Or do they just dump that on Mayor Tomas Osmeña immobilized in his Texas hospital sickbed? “All a man can betray is his conscience,” Joseph Conrad wrote.

Tinsel, wrecked diets, Santa Claus, etc. don’t make Christmas. “The birth of Jesus is not the same fairy tale meant to warm the heart,” writes Ron Rolheiser OMI. “We measure time by this event....It is also about a harsh non-negotiable challenge to clean up our self-centered lives and build some justice."

Christmas 2008 comes to a society atrophied by injustice, as it did two millennia ago. “There was oppression for those who are not friends of Tiberius Caesar. Corruption, abuse, summary executions were rife. There was everywhere a contempt for human life,” the 1948 Wall Street Journal Christmas editorial recalls. “What was a man for but to serve Caesar?”

The Caesars, Herods, Scrooges never left. Only their names have changed. Then, and now, it is still the poor who bear the brunt. The richest Cebuanos consume 37 centavos out of every peso. The poorest make do with two centavos.

One recalls a Grade One teacher who checked why one child crouched below her desk. “She didn’t want us to see her eat breakfast – green papaya, soaked in salt and vinegar.”

You bump into this vulnerable child everywhere. Christmas time, they emerge as the “bottle-cap brigade”: grimy kids who whack tansan tambourines at street corners to cadge a peso or two.

Chronic hunger opens floodgates to debilitating diseases. Incidence of TB here is 450 per 100,000 population. Compare that to Malaysia’s 131. Out of every 100 births, 20 were wizened underweight infants. Thailand has nine.

The odds are stacked against them by a society of padlocked hearts. Among the poorest families, as in Pasil, 66 out of every 100 infants will die before reaching age 5. Within the gated enclaves of the rich, like Maria Luisa, mortality rate is two thirds lower at 21.

Herod’s soldiers slaughtering kids, below two years of age, in Bethlehem were just as lethal. “A cry is heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation,” Matthew writes. “Rachel weeps for her children…for they are no more.”

God did not come into our hard-as-flint world “as some superstar whose power, beauty and muscle dwarf us,” the Latin American theologian Leonard Boff wrote. On Christmas, “God entered human history. He made our lot his own" -- our fears, hurts, pettiness and betrayals, our cancers and Alzheimers, even our dying.

Christmas is all for us. "We have been given, in this Child, all that we want and could hope for," Fr. Catalino Arevalo SJ writes. "His name shall be called Emmanuel which means: God is with us."

Malipayong Pasko!

(juan_mercado@prime.net.ph)

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(December 21, 2008 issue)
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