Season of carols

Super typhoon, 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 Kristinn and Kathie are now in Sweden to pick up the language of their mother. They’ sing the carol:  “Nur har l jus har i vart”  “We have kindled the cande”. After Christmas, they return to Cebu—where bickering officials can’t get together to save 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 Jullie Yap Daza wrote in 1978.

Some carols go back centuries. And old favorites, like “Adeste Fildelis” 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) songs, in front 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 today  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. Tiene 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 hand over a letter for a Missionary of Charity sister. Many call them, “Mother Teresa nuns. But in the star-lantern festooned front yard, 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 tread 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 flush with cash see 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 his Mary his mother, the ancient story goes.