This is a picture of Christmas season in the northern part of the world. In America and Europe, when you look out window, you can see landscapes like this: bare leafless trees, snow, and frozen water. It’s a time of year subdued and colorless — when days are short, twilights linger, and midnights seem to stay.
Aside from Christmas, it’s not a particularly pleasant time of year — getting around is difficult and dangerous, roads are slippery with ice, sharp wind cuts like an icy knife when you walk. People tend to stay inside where it’s warm, and go outside only when they have to — to shop for Christmas, perhaps.
Except for the children waiting breathlessly for Christmas morning to see what’s underneath the tree, it’s a quiet time; a time for small gatherings of family and close friends, a time to remember and care for the people close to you.
Christmas here in the Philippines is almost the exact opposite of this in spirit. Here it’s hardly subdued or quiet or colorless. Deafening explosions of firecrackers and triangle bombs fill the humid air with powder smoke. Endless street parades, with garish costumes and loudly-beaten drums enthrall the sweating street side crowds.
Fireworks displays fill the night skies with fire. To foreigners it all seems more like some noisy Chinese festival than a religious holiday. But appearances aside, it’s still Christmas. It’s still the celebration of the birth of Jesus, an event that changed the world forever, east and west, north and south.
That this event is celebrated in such different ways simply demonstrates its universal importance. Whether officially Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, or even atheist, no country, no culture can be unaware of Christmas when it comes.
Christmas Day, Dec. 25, 2012 — two thousand and 12 years ago, something happened in Bethlehem, and most of the world still counts that event as the beginning of its time scale and its calendar.
Many people don’t have any particularly religious feeling about Christmas. But even so, the realization that a new structure, a new reality came into the world and changed it completely on one night in an obscure village in the Middle East 2,000 years ago -— this thought may, for a moment, pass through everyone’s mind, and give them a moment’s pause.
And this thing happened in a cold season, in a cold landscape like this one, at the very end of a year.
