“Really?! But Halloween hasn’t come yet!” replied a gobsmacked friend when I told her about the Christmas decorations being already up in the Philippines.
“Crazy, isn’t it?” I texted back.
The holiday decorations have been up since September, the start of the “ber” months leading to December. Crazy as it sounds, it’s true. Being a Filipino, I should be used to it by now, but I am not, unlike majority of my kababayan who proudly bandy to the whole world that we have the longest Christmas celebrations or have unparalleled Christmas celebrations. I just keep quiet about it, always wondering why, and feeling amazed that they don’t find it stressful. My friend is Indonesian, and so I could freely say crazy. My view wouldn’t have gone down well with fellow Filipinos.
The holiday madness is palpable with just two days to go before Christmas that staying put at home is a wise decision. Roads are congested with cars at a standstill or moving turtle-paced on every road, including overhead passes. The ports are seeing kilometric queues of cars waiting to get onto the boats to ferry them, say, from Batangas to Calapan, Oriental Mindoro. Everyone’s out — heading to the airport to catch a flight out, going shopping, soaking up the Christmas vibe or eating at the malls.
Getting home has become a test of patience and fortitude because public transportation is “broken.” Broadcast journalist Atom Araullo summed up the feelings of Filipino commuters in a tweet in Filipino and English on December 9.
“Just arrived at the airport from an overseas trip. No coupon taxis, no metered taxis, no Grab. We don’t have buses or trains here. Basically, if you have no one picking you up, you’re dead. This is what a broken [transportation] system looks like,” he wrote.
In an update, he tweeted he was able to get a ride via Grab after less than two hours of waiting and changing his pick-up location.
Our neighborhood hasn’t been spared of the craziness either. Traditionally, the garbage collectors handed out envelopes neatly labelled with their truck number around this period when they come for their routinely garbage pick-up. We could hand them back with money on the spot or the following collection day. This year some of the collectors were more aggressive. They rang doorbells and banged on gates to ask for their Christmas gift outside of their collection days. Not a few neighbors pointed out that they’ve already received money-filled envelopes.
There’s no one major cause of my morose attitude. I surmised that all the little things snowballed into one giant mass of aloofness and self-diagnosed cherophobia through the years. Truthfully, I’m never aloof unless I’m sleeping, working out, nursing a headache or deep in work. I was, said a former flatmate, a sunflower vis-a-vis her “mushroom” disposition. But that hasn’t been the case for a while. I’ve been distant and uninterested in everything around me. Shockingly, I’ve even shunned meeting friends. I wanted to, but couldn’t bring myself to reach out to them, including a dear high school friend.
I don’t have an immense aversion to happiness yet, riding the wave of cherophobia, my thoughts this season vacillate between thinking that being happy means something bad will happen and that being happy is bad for everyone. Perhaps it’s the past disappointments in life, i.e., broken promises, lies, betrayals, and heartbreaks, which are amplified during this merry month of the year, that pushed me to be aloof and get shrouded in cherophobia. Perhaps.
Still, I try to shake off the veil. I have some degree of success and so, feel the holiday spirit, albeit fleetingly. The Christmas decorations in the malls are nice to look at. I marvel at the creativity and energy of the teams behind the sparkly Christmas tableaux wrapped in the season’s colors. I also can’t help wonder at how many ideas were rejected before the final one was approved, and if they felt the spirit while decorating the mall. Or were they going through the motion?
It’s a struggle to be completely merry when you’re cresting the wave of cherophobia, but being half merry is better than being flat out low-spirited this time of merry-making.
Simplify and Breathe 