There are few things so contagious as Christmas in Manila. The streets come alive with spiraling lights and glowing parols. Mariah Carey reigns in every mall and, out from each corner of every barangay spills the sound of belting karaoke and sappy ballads. With everyone home for the holidays, the usual city crowds multiply. People pour out onto the church steps at mass, some so far away as to only hear the sound of the sermon from outdoor speakers, keeping the heat at bay with abaniko and pamaypay fans. The city stays awake for Noche Buena, with whole pigs skewered on the table for lechon, pancit and lengua and platters of baked kakanin ready for grazing throughout the night. Temperature aside, the Philippines warms even more at Christmastime.
Christmas at home was a childhood highlight. My Lolo would string the stairs up with tinsel, and the papier-mache snow man I’d made as a child would somehow find its way back onto a table. A dancing life-sized Santa Claus (long story) would wiggle in a corner beside a Christmas tree laden with ornaments and flickering with rave-like strobe lights. My mom would take me around my favorite bookstores until we’d meet my Lolo at the only Cinnabon to catch one of the last English movies before the Metro Manila Film Festival took over, showing exclusively Filipino films at all cinemas from Christmas through to the new year. At various lunches and dinners in the days to follow, we’d see more family than I remembered having.
All my life, there has been so much joy tangled up with Christmas. It only made sense that, when joy became difficult for me, Christmas was hit the hardest. It’s hard to forget the years I spent fighting to feel anything in December. Though this was at a time when joy was difficult all year round, Christmas festivities introduced a new level of dread and guilt. I teetered off the edge of joy and into a quickfire fear. A fear that I would fail to feel joy enough, that I would fail those around me by not rising to the level of happiness meant for the occasion.
With work and time, this fear has loosened its grip. I’m thankful to be able to say that I found my joy again – for Christmas, and for life. But, remembering this dread as a passing echo in this grim late November, I’m reminded of how strong emotions can often occupy neighboring spaces. A step too far in wanting to feel joy and I pushed myself into despair. A step too far and care morphed into fear.
With senior year upon me, there has lurked this sense of finality. Fall’s end has meant the end of a college fall. With every shift in color on campus trees, I’m reminded that this is the last time I’ll ever see each particular tree in these specific shades. Recounting this fearful rumination to a friend, I was met by the surprising remark that maybe seeing blazing autumnal leaves was beautiful because it meant that I’d see more beautiful trees in the future. Each tree was a proof of concept, seeing one now shouldn’t ignite the fear that I’d never have this particular moment again, but instead serve as evidence that more was to come. “Like how every end,” my poetic friend said, “is also a beginning.”
I try so hard to be present. I try so hard to be a good student, a good friend, a good daughter that sometimes I worry that I cultivate my care from fear. Like with Christmas, when I wanted so badly to care for the thing I loved the most – even when I couldn’t – that I put myself in a constant fear of doing wrong by it.
In philosophy the other day, we talked about the paradox of hedonism: how pleasure-seekers, ironically, push themselves further away from a pleasurable life by making choices that will result in long-term dissatisfaction. We also touched on the paradox of utilitarianism, how defining your morality by trying to minimize the suffering caused by your actions becomes unachievable if the expectation is to run moral calculus for every little thing. In both paradoxes, too much of one thing shoots it in the foot. To achieve that Goldilocks level of “just right,” rules must be slackened.
My mistake with Christmas, when I was at my darkest, was to soften it into a one-dimensional ideal. I couldn’t feel sad, otherwise I’d fail. But that meant that I’d started seeking joy from a place of fear. A far, wrestled cry from the joy I’d had to begin with. Re-learning my joy meant learning to be okay with having some sad Christmases. In that same way, wanting to be a good person for fear of being a bad person has to be intrinsically different from wanting to be a good person for the joy of it. Wanting to savor every moment of my senior year before it’s over must be different from embracing it.
I think too often in terms of losses and finalities, ideals and achievement, but as the weather gets colder, I’m trying to get closer to that early instinct to be driven by joy, not fear. This Christmas, I won’t be home. My Lolo and Lola have passed on. Just months ago, their house was locked up for sale. I won’t hear Tagalog into the new year. But instead of running from the uncertainty of this Christmas, of this fall, of whatever’s to come with the new year, I’m choosing to face it. If every autumn tree is an emblem of beauty to come, every experience not a door closing but a new room, then there is much joy to guide me.
Kaitlin Tan is a senior from Manila, Philippines, majoring in Writing Seminars and Cognitive Science. She is the Voices Editor for The News-Letter. In her column, she tries to parse through the everyday static for something to hold onto.
