Christmas becomes all about kids

+it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, originally uploaded by: jwlphotography

I know too well how grippingly Christmas would be if I’d spend it all alone all by myself, cooking for myself. My Hong Kong Christmas has never been that joyful place since. For years I was too frightened of being alone to spend it myself so each time when Christmas comes, it’s served as a reminder of how empty and unhappy my life had become. Each year, I fixed the best smile I could onto my face and got through it. It’s funny how only the lonely and sad can seem to recognise each other in their eyes. I realised that each time Christmas comes, there were many other unhappy people in the world beside me.

In my youth, I loved it – in fact, I loved it until I moved in Hong Kong several years later. I realized as I grow up, things has changed that eventhough I am far away from my other family in Bicol, I still had two brothers here to celebrate it with but until they’d got married and started their own family, I’d felt like - knowing that I am single person for years, always insisted that I’d spent it alone. Frankly, I wasn’t always in the mood to be all joyous and cheerful.

And you know, when it’s cold, it gets lonely. It’s my 18th year of Christmas in Hong Kong and if I can remember it correctly, I’d only spent it once or maybe twice in Bicol. Boy, how enjoyable it was back there. My kind of Christmas has lost its magic the year my parents left Hong Kong and my two brothers got married and now it was like they were abandoning me on the most sacred of all family holidays all by myself. So I recalled, well I still have friends to hang out with in case they’d forgotten me on their family Christmas dinner.

So I usually mingle with friends on an early Christmas party. They liked drinking a lot of wine, so I figured it wouldn’t be that bad at all either. Wine or no wine, as I learned, sitting around at another family’s Christmas, watching everyone opening gifts after gifts, knowing there’s nothing under the tree left for you, is simply miserable. Can you imagine?

So I decided to spend it my family this year. I didn’t miss the small party eventhough I was late. For a single person like me, they knew I’d be somewhere else spending it with my friends. Fact is, my friends has all disappeared. Some of us can reinvent our role in the family Christmas scenario as the cool Aunt or the crazy Uncle, so I choose to relish the wonder of my niece and nephews and see the holiday anew through their fresh eyes. And the way I see it, none of us really didn’t want those presents at all - at least there was the moment of laughing at each other. So then we planned of another family Christmas next time and I’d probably be the one cooking.

It’s true that Christmas is never always about buying a new shoes, perfumes or giving out presents nor is it about the great food or the gifts from this person or that person - but what matters is that, we spend it together with a nice pleasantries, phoning home as an obligatory call to the rest of the family back home, hearing my Mother laughing and excited about her three grandsons going into the adulthood is what she’s been looking forward to while I was shaking off the guilt of not giving out presents and eating another slice of cake, is something more pleasant than thinking of all the things I could buy for myself.

I don’t mean to say that the true meaning of Christmas disappears. But the way we celebrate it changes as we grow older. In a more natural progression of life, our own family members will eventually get marry, will have children so we pass on the magic to them, so therefore Christmas becomes all about kids, and that’s how it should be, innit?

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