Supertyphoon, droughts, or pork barrel scams notwithstanding, Christmas will come. And with that feast, those carols: old, new, silly — and fading. Indeed, carols are about “a season that gives us an array of luminous images that hint at all manner of annunciations,” New Yorker magazine notes.
“Ang Pasko ay Sumapit is my favorite carol,” says our granddaughter Kristin, 9. “Mine, too,” says Kathie, 7. They meant the hijacked Tagalog version of Kasadya ning Takna-a, the winning daygon first played at the 1933 Cebu Christmas festival.
Both Kristin and Kathie are now in Sweden to pick up the language of their mother. They sing the carol: “Nur har I jus har I vart” “We have kindled the candle.” After Christmas, they return to Cebu — where bickering officials can’t get together to save the native daygons.
“I’ve often wondered why White Christmas seems the most popular carol, especially among migrant workers,” emailed journalist Betty Escoda from Hong Kong. “It’s a pity as we have so many nice native carols of our own.”
Is a festival of our carols beyond us?
The late Vicente Rubi of Cebu composed Kasdaya ning Takna-a. Mariano Vestil scribbled the lyrics. A Manila recording company swiped their work in 1938. Both were never paid. Until his death in 1980, impoverished widower Rubi would shuffle down and teach startled carolers how to sing his daygon.
Lyricist Vestil died in 2004, noted only by an inside-page-below-the-fold newspaper obituary. “It remains supreme irony that not the slightest effort has been made to attribute the beloved carol to Vicente Rubi and Mariano Vestil,” columnist Julie Yap Daza wrote in 1978.
Some carols go back centuries. And old favorites, like Adeste Fidelis and Silent Night, endure. And the 1861 (?) carol says of the little town of Bethlehem: “The hopes and fears of all the years/Are met in thee tonight.” But whatever happened to those lilting Spanish carols like Nacio, Nacio Pastores?
“Every Christmas Day, we still sing these villancicos (Spanish carols) infront of the belen in my mother’s home,” Ricky Gallaga emailed from Bacolod City years back. “Vamos, pastores, vamos, vamos a Belen” to A ver en aquel nino, la Gloria del Eden. “We teach them to our grandchildren.” But Ricky forms a shrinking group.
Filipino Overseas Workers have brought these carols to over 193 countries and territories. Roughly 3,752 Filipinos leave daily. That’s 28 times the first clutch of timid migrants who left five decades back. They’re young. Majority are between 25 to 44 years old. And 36, out of every 100, have a college degree.
Christmas Eve at Society of Divine Word mother house in Rome, the wife and I saw some of them. Star lanterns festooned Verbiti. Lights blinked from a Nativity crib or belen. Even lechons were on the table. Filipino OFWs sang carols. These included Pasko na Naman.
Tears slipped past tightly-closed eyes. Christmas is “Emmanuel, God with us” in the dark, loneliness and pain, Filipino SVD fathers told their expat flock. Here is part of the diaspora’s untabulated costs. Hidden behind those foreign exchange remittances are pain, separation, alienation, trauma even. Tienes cara de hambre. “You have the face of hunger,” the orphan boy Marcelino told the Crucified.
One mid-Advent, we drove a humid Tondo side road to reach a hospice. We were handed over a letter for a Missionary of Charity sister. Many call them “Mother Teresa nuns”. But in the star-lantern festooned frontyard, one bumped the 1843 classic Charles Dickens world of Christmases past, present and yet-to-come.
About 25 kids, from 3 to 8 years of age, milled around the yard. In blue-lined sari-habits, three nuns were filling with medicine bottles thrust forward by scrawny, prematurely-wrinkled mothers. “Tuberculosis,” said Sister Rose Magdalene. “Poverty runs deep here.”
TB spreads like brushfire in slum homes, on short food rations and shoddy sanitation. Reminds you of Bob Crachit, underpaid 15 shillings a month by Ebenezer Scrooge.
“(These are) immortal creatures, condemned without alternative or choice, to treat paths of jagged flints and stones by brutal ignorance,” and an avaricious elite, the 31-year-old Dickens told the Manchester Atheneum.
As in Dicken’s time, our social order is one where pork barrel, bank accounts, padded by graft, gauge self-worth. So, these packets are nothing to that illegal logger who lights his cigars with hundred-peso bills. Ask Imee Marcos and JV Estrada who hold Virgin Island secret bank accounts.
Yet, “Christmas is the only time I know of, in the long calendar year, when men and women seem, by one consent, to open their shut-up hearts freely,” he wrote. Even those with cash tend to “people below them, as if they were really fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”
Give love on Christmas Day, the radio blared on our way back from Tondo, where the present and future blend into one for those who daily serve the poorest. “And they found the Child with Mary his mother,” the ancient story goes.
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