PUBLISHED: Student & Campus Section, Manila Bulletin, 13 May 2009 Issue (Page E-3)

I don’t know whether you’ve noticed it, too, but it seems to me that we tend to commemorate Mother’s Day by hastily making plans for it, executing them, and then forgetting about them immediately afterward. We all appear to be contented with celebrating Mother’s Day in a dizzying flurry of restaurants, flowers, and cards, culminating in one shining, momentary expression of love that’s akin to a display of fireworks: dazzling and noisy until it ends in a quiet cloud of smoke that dissipates in a matter of minutes, leaving no traces that it ever happened.

Mother’s Day has become just another date to be crossed out on our calendars, and it’s sad because most of us aren’t even aware of it. We make so much of a fuss over how to celebrate it to the point that we come to measure its value by the success of our grandiose plans or the grandness of our tiny gestures. To put it simply, we worry so much about Mother’s Day that we forget to worry about Mother.

This was what I realized last Sunday, when we didn’t celebrate Mother’s Day.

Or at least, we didn’t in the normal(ized) sense of the word. We couldn’t. Father was busy winning the bread—he had a lecture to give for the whole day; I was caught up with writing my papers and studying for the week’s coming long tests. Only Little Sister and Littler Brother had little enough to do to be able to contemplate how we were going to make a gesture, and they only did so the day before when, in the absence of the annual orders from High Command regarding Operation: Mom Day—something of a yearly tradition for us—they realized that the fate of the holiday was in their hands. In practical terms, it meant that the budget would come from their own pockets.

To their credit, they managed to arrange for a humble gesture at midnight, consisting of a card we bought thanks to the P40 remaining in Little Brother’s pocket, and our best hugs for the greatest mom in the whole wide world, which were free. Many of our conceived plans failed: Father failed to buy flowers because his car broke down (I had to pick him up from his lecture that night), and I failed to buy Krispy Kreme since I cancelled my plans for a night out. But despite the apparent lameness of our gestures, for which we had to make lame excuses (“Mom, we’re just driving out to…um, buy…uh, DVDs…”), Mom appreciated the fact that we made an effort. I think she wasn’t even expecting that we would, or could.

But when I look back on all the years we’ve shopped for, surprised, and even scared the bejesus out of Mother, I find that all her reactions are similar. The amount of effort, money or time we spend in planning for Mother’s Day isn’t directly proportional to the amount of appreciation she has for the gestures we make. I suspect that if I bought her something amazingly expensive, her reaction would stay the same. I guess mothers are just special that way, loving you all the same even if your gestures are unoriginal, overused and lame.

Part of the point I’m trying to make is practical. Spending more money on expensive donuts and even more expensive hotel dinners won’t make Mother’s Day any more special than if you stayed home and cooked her dinner. In fact, the opposite may be true: she’d probably be more touched if you made her a macaroni card with a doodle of her in front and a touching message inside. After all, grand gestures are only of worth if there’s grand love behind it.

But more importantly, the point is that Mother’s Day is not just another holiday. It is not about the restaurants, the flowers and the cards. It never was to begin with. The fact that we bother ourselves so much with these little things causes us to forget about the big picture, or worse, distort it. Mother’s Day is supposed to leave a mark, not disappear into ashes until we decide to light it up again.

Mother’s Day is not about that one shining moment where she is momentarily significant; it is about reminding her that she has always been significant. And if we spend the day simply going through the convenient motions of a Hallmark holiday without going beyond the clichés to tell her, honestly, how we feel, then Mother’s Day isn’t worth celebrating. It becomes a fake, plastic holiday.

We can’t celebrate Mother’s Day if every other day wasn’t mother’s day for us to begin with.

This article is dedicated to all the mothers who didn’t get to celebrate Mother’s Day, but is most especially dedicated to my Mom. I love you!

One of the unique things about our country is the fact that Christmas always starts much, much earlier here than the actual season does. I know for a fact that TV and radio hosts start hinting at it as soon as September, the first “-ber” month, begins. By the time we hit October, countdowns start appearing on our favorite morning shows, and commercials begin to have a Christmas-like feel.

When November rolls around, they start doing a variety of Christmas-related segments, like where to get your gifts and how to celebrate Christmas most economically. Households start putting up their decorations, friends start practicing their Christmas carols, and people in general are caught up in the spirited frenzy of Christmas shopping. It is an amazing phenomenon, since by the beginning of December it looks as if our country were one big Christmas tree, and we’re just waiting for Jesus to get born already.

This year, though, that atmosphere is noticeably absent—at least around the area where I live. Where the streets would usually be lit up with multi-colored Christmas lights, and noisy with those annoying Christmas carol tunes that manufacturers attach to them, the roads are as dull and quiet as they were all year long. The only Christmas carols I hear are from street children who knock on your car window in Quezon Avenue or pester you while you walk along Katipunan. Most of my neighbors haven’t even put up Christmas decorations.

In fact, if you were to come into my house you might think we had forgotten all about it. Save for one grey-colored wreath hanging on the front door and a couple of unopened gifts lying around in one of the corners, there is no sign that Christmas has entered this household. We didn’t even set up the Christmas tree.

The Christmas spirit seems to be dead.

But sometimes I wonder: what if you removed every single material manifestation that we have to remember Christmas by? Take away all the lights, the decorations, the commercials, the songs, and even the gifts. Would Christmas still be worth celebrating? Would Christmas still exist?

Last Friday at a Christmas party, my friend and I joked that you could boil down the true spirit of Christmas to gifts. And not in giving gifts, I said, but in receiving them. This is why in contrast to receiving, which is always unconditional (who wouldn’t want to get gifts?) we give gifts expecting something in return. This ’something’, of course, does not have to be material. It could be an emotion, like a feeling that someone is grateful, or putting a smile on someone else’s face. For this reason, Christmas is always partly selfish.

But I think that’s okay. I think everyone’s looking for something during Christmas, and that’s why the true spirit of Christmas depends on who you ask. For some, it is the chance to be with family you haven’t seen in a year. For others, it is the chance to be alone and get away from their own problems. Some look for love and the opportunity to be with someone special. Others look for forgiveness. Some people want to be able to finally complete the whole Simbang Gabi cycle. Other people, like me, don’t really know what we want for Christmas.

But the beauty of it all is that this season is just as much about receiving as it is about giving. You might not get exactly what you’re looking for, but it is that one time of the year that people are willing to collectively give, live, and let live—quite a remarkable feat for humankind. That is why miracles happen, why people find love, and why most people, even those who have nothing to smile about, can smile during Christmas.

The beauty of it all is that Christmas has always been about people.

That is why I don’t need to see decorations hung up or have gifts under the Christmas tree to feel the Christmas spirit. I just need to look around the dinner table, see the face of each member of the family, and I am reminded that whether or not it’s Christmas, I will always have a place to come home to.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

I’ve always been genuinely interested in learning about the relationships that my peers have with their parents. Sometimes I wonder if my friends find me weird for asking about them: family background, characteristics, degree of closeness, and the like. It’s certainly not a topic my peers would normally bring up. After all, there are lots of other things to talk about, like music and sports and who they’re dating.

Some don’t find it difficult to talk about their parents at all. This usually means that they either share a really good relationship with them, or it’s so bad that they just have to talk about it. Others prefer not to share. Still, others talk about them in a superficial way, giving answers that lead to dead-ends in the conversation. In any case, hearing, or even not hearing, about them is always interesting.

Maybe it’s because the relationship you have with your parents tells something about the kind of person you are—regardless of other outside influences that might exist.

Some people end up remarkably similar to their own fathers and mothers. If you look at me and my father, for example, you could make a couple of observations. We’re both left-handed, we both like our coffee black, and we dress up in almost exactly the same way—that is to say, with almost blatant disregard for common fashion sense. We also think the same way, to the point that we ponder things in the exact same position (someone once took a picture. It’s true.) Also, I find that my fun, boisterous, heavy drinker friends, more often than not, have fun, boisterous, heavy drinker fathers or mothers. I find it very amusing.

On the other hand, other similarities can be a lot more subtle, and not quite as amusing. People talk about how they don’t want to end up being like their moms and dads, yet end up becoming exactly like them. I have a couple of rebellious friends who have some insanely strict parents, who in turn were rebellious in their own time as well. I hope it’s not an indicator of what kind of parents my friends will wind up becoming.

Sometimes the influences are tragic. One of my good friends once noted the behavior of her womanizing uncle, saying that maybe the reason why her uncle is such a womanizer is because he never had a mother figure, so he started looking for affection in other places. Maybe she’s right.

It would be wrong for me to generalize all forms of parental influence as bad. Just because your parents complain that you’re going out too much this sembreak does not mean that their advice isn’t sound, or that they’re raising you the wrong way. Besides, who am I to speak about parenting?

But I guess parents should take time once in a while to think about the kind of kids they are raising—or leaving behind, as the case may be. Sometimes we might be a little bit hard to understand, but it might help to look at it in our point of view once in a while. After all, parents were children—and hormonal teenagers—too, once upon a time. And hormonal teenagers don’t often take lightly to moralistic sermons.

On the other hand, I think we have to meet them halfway. The reason parents can sound so moralistic is because they do have some wisdom to impart. They have experience. If we can respect and listen to our teachers, then I think we can do the same for our parents. It’s a matter of balancing between the extremes of youth and experience, I guess.

In the end, I’d like to think that as people with independent minds, we have the greatest capability for forming ourselves, quite apart from outside influences. But if our parents’ influences are inescapable, then they have a pretty huge responsibility, because they might be dictating the way our lives play out without even knowing it.

It’s the same responsibility we’ll have when we become parents.

Oh no.