Call me sentimental, even a bit melodramatic, but I still long for the simpler Christmas I grew up with. I always wish for the kind you prepared for with people who mattered, long before the holidays became loud, lavish, and hurried.
Because back then, Christmas didn’t have to impress. It just had to feel genuine.
Back then, decorations weren’t hauled from shopping carts or online checkouts. The parol was made of bamboo sticks tied by small hands, wrapped in Japanese paper that glowed softly when lit.
We built them in school, submitted them to our practical arts teachers, and proudly hung them on our windows.
Angels were cut from old folders while Christmas trees were made from makeshift branches.
Nothing fancy, but everything held a story. Every light, every knot, every crease spoke of patience, excitement, and the kind of joy you can never buy in a store.
Back then, Christmas arrived slowly. It tiptoed in with the first radio carols on the transistor radio, long before September became an unofficial holiday month.
It crept in with the smell of fields cooling at sunset, and with the quiet certainty that Christmas was less about the sparkle and more about the soul.
Back then, the Noche Buena table wasn’t assembled through delivery apps.
There was no rider honking at the gate with trays of food. The kitchen itself was the heart of the season as it pulsated with busy hands and voices.
Whether it was the fruit salad, pastillas, polvoron, kalame ube, lagang Pasku, everyone had a task. Somebody mixed, someone stirred, someone argued about the right amount of sugar.
Despite the chaos, or maybe because of it, everything ended up perfectly because it tasted like home.
Back then, the Simbang Gabi wasn’t a backdrop for photos. Parents together with their sleepy-eyed children woke before dawn and walked through foggy streets, guided only by dim lamps and devotion.
You didn’t go to post about it. You went because of your faith.
Back then, Christmas morning had its own kind of magic. After Mass, children formed little armies and went house to house, greeting elders with “Siklod pu, makipamasku kami pu!”
The aguinaldo was never large, just enough for candies, marbles, or a comic book; but the joy was in the journey.
Laughing with friends, comparing envelopes, counting the day’s “earnings” before sundown. It wasn’t about money.
It was childhood, friendship and Christmas all wrapped into one incomparable and unforgettable wonder.
And back then, communities felt closer. Neighbors shared ingredients and delivered a llanera of home-mode kalame ube or leche flan. Children sang carols door to door.
Families gathered outside churches over bibingka and puto bumbong. Christmas didn’t stay inside homes but it spilled into the streets and into everyone’s lives.
Today, as the season grows louder and brighter, may we remember that Christmas has always lived in the quiet corners: in the hands that prepare the food, in the feet that walk to dawn Mass, in the laughter of children carrying envelopes and hope.
Perhaps this year, we can choose to slow down. To simplify. To find again the warmth we once knew.
Because sometimes, moving forward begins with going back.
Back then.
