Saturday, December 22, 2007 Holiday autopilot By Ober Khok
NO one can remain stoic during the brief Christmas open-season week; that is, Dec. 18 to 24. People are moved to give gifts.
My barometer for this flurry of activity is the mall. Harried women scuttling from aisle to aisle looking for an ingredient that is fast diminishing.
“Why is it that people think of the same food to serve at Christmas? Oh dear, the mall run out of graham crackers! How will I ever make my mango float now?” my Tita Blitte complained to me when we were shopping late yesterday.
“Uh, telepathy?”
“I need those crackers badly, so don’t joke.” My aunt gave me her Mona Lisa look—it means, “I’m not pleased”—and so I shut up and browsed over the shelves for something sweet to give to my godchildren.
After she’d purchased all the ingredients she needed for our Christmas feast (no mango float this year), but without the graham crackers, we took the escalator to shop at the second floor for gifts to buy our friends and loved ones.
At the second floor, I saw all kinds of people pulling one object after another and returning them in another shelf. Tired salesgirls put them back on the shelves but shoppers were faster in demolishing the neat piles of shirts, short pants, towels and pillowcases.
The shoppers looked like they were being chased by their worst nightmare: forgetting to give someone a gift and giving a gift that the recipient might not like, and the likelihood that they would hurt someone during this happy and festive season.
Most, though, seemed contented just picking out something nice and putting it in their shopping basket. They did it on autopilot.
I am also on autopilot today as I write this. No thought stays too long in my mind today because I am thinking of the party my friends and I organized for a balikbayan buddy. He comes all the way from Las Vegas.
We have in store for him a Filipino welcome, a party as only a Filipino can conceive, and a dining experience that should satiate his hungry days in the hot, Vegas desert.
The dryness we feel in our tongue, post-Christmas, becomes only bearable if we have put meaning into why we eat and make merry. We are remembering the Savior of the world.
If we do otherwise, you know, treating Christmas just like another commercial excuse to spend, then celebrating this season is just like an empty gong making noise.
It is just a good reason to get so drunk you kiss the dust on the floor.
