(This piece is in response to a Facebook post by PGMN anchor Orion Perez Dumdum.)
EVERY September, the country begins to sound different.
It starts quietly. A familiar melody slips into a jeepney radio. A string of lights appears where there was none the week before. Somewhere, someone hums a carol without thinking too much about it. And almost on cue, the annual correction follows: that this is not Christmas, not yet, not even close. That what fills the air is merely preparation, stretched thin by commerce and habit.
But the truth is, no one is confused about the date.
What people are responding to is something less precise, and far more necessary.
Because the months leading up to September rarely arrive gently. They come layered with disruption. Disasters that force communities to rebuild again before they have fully recovered. News cycles that feel increasingly tense, increasingly divided. The slow, everyday strain of making ends meet. For students, it is the steady pressure of schoolwork piling up, of expectations that do not pause just because life outside the classroom feels heavy.
By the time September arrives, the year has already taken its toll.
So when the first notes of Christmas begin to surface, they do not signal a misunderstanding of the calendar. They signal a shift in atmosphere, however slight. A softening. The suggestion that something kinder is approaching.
It is easy to dismiss this as manufactured, as a byproduct of malls and marketing strategies that benefit from stretching a season. And yes, those forces exist. They are visible, loud, impossible to ignore.
But they are not the reason the feeling stays.
What keeps it alive is something quieter. More personal. The way Filipinos, in the middle of uncertainty, have learned to reach for whatever offers even a brief sense of steadiness. Christmas, in that sense, is not just a date. It is one of the few shared ideas of relief, of generosity, of reunion that still feels within reach.
In a time marked by crisis, disasters, political instability, and division, that idea carries weight.
For many, especially students, beginning to feel it earlier is not indulgence. It is survival, reframed. A way of stretching hope across months that might otherwise feel too long, too uncertain. Hearing a carol in September does not mean pretending it is already December. It means allowing yourself to believe, even briefly, that something good is on its way.
And it’s not just the music anymore. It’s the timelines. The recycled clips. The inevitable return of Jose Mari Chan smiling from a meme like he never left, or Mariah Carey slowly “defrosting” back into everyone’s feed. It’s half joke, half ritual. But it works. It gives people something to laugh at, something familiar to share, something that cuts through the usual noise of bad news and daily stress.
You can insist on calling all of this “preparation.” You wouldn’t be wrong.
But that word feels too small for what people are actually doing.
Because what returns every September is not just a shopping season. It’s a mood people lean into. A brief easing of the year’s weight. A reminder, however early, that things can still feel lighter than they do right now.
And maybe that is why it refuses to go away.
Not because people don’t understand Christmas.
But because, given everything happening around them, they need to feel it sooner.
- Dianne Venus Partol
