The Myths of the "Ber Months

The countdown for Christmas has already started in major cities and in major media TV networks all over the Philippines. We in Bikol - in Naga especially - do not start counting the way to Yuletide until after September. We know the reason for that: the Peñafrancia occupies our consciousness till the end of that month. Comes November then we begin going with the fashion of the metropolis: exclaim and declare that we have the longest celebration of Christmas.

The shortest and the thinnest. The oldest and the youngest. The record for the longest celebration and the impossibly stretched observance of a once-a-year celebration partakes of what the Guinness Book of World Records and not really of what humanity and culture should be proud of.

Where does this claim reside, that we observe Christmas the longest?

If there is a perfect metaphor for what and who we are as people then Christmas and its avowed celebration is that. Music and songs become the metaphor and there we discover our claims, our regrets and our claims and our confusion about this season.

We go for the rhythm, the surface beat of the song.  It is really a language thing. Or a borrowing and appropriation of the language.

Last Thursday, getting off the bus in Cubao, I felt the chill of the season. "Climate change," I told myself.  "Christmas," the rebuttal came from the wind. "Pah, the wind in the reeds," if Samuel Beckett's tramp were there. But then a song was piping through the air: Sleigh bells ring, are you listening. I was stepping down on the last step of the bus, and below me I could see glistening in the 4 o'clock dawn light was the dank, greasy, oil-sogged, wet pavement. Santa Claus would slip down dead in this setting. Saint Nicholas would not sell his Christmas bread in this squalor.

I went in the toilet, and after finishing my business, and ignoring the air poisoned by urine transported through RORO from as far as Mindanao, the air outside beckoned again, this time perfumed inordinately by "Silent Night." I looked up and saw what the Tagalogs call "bukang-liwayway." I look for the "Kagbubuwas," the Tigaonon term for Morning Star or literally, the "Star of the Morning Becoming." "Sir, Taxi. Metro lang."

What are taxis? Vehicles that price their trip based on meters, an agreed-upon measurement. In this city and soon in our city, taxis will be divided into those cars that charge by meters and those who feel they should not. One strange thing though about the taxis this early, early Christmas morning in Cubao, is that they speak Bikol. In Naga, taxi drivers speak Tagalog.

There is that song we love to call "Ang Pasko ay Sumapit" but whose title really appears as "Maligayang Pasko at Masaganang Bagong Taon" on musical sheet. The piece is made popular with the lyrics provided by the late Levi Celerio, National Artist for Music. The song is originally in Cebuano, composed by Vicente D. Rubi and Mariano Vestil in 1933.

It is a song that speaks so much about how we can expand Christmas to our eccentric liking. It speaks also about how odd we are with certain music cut for certain seasons. The song with the lyrics of Celerion was used with a martial tempo for a movie called "Ang Pugad ng Agila."

Listen to the song again and some of its lines. They betray so much what we can be and what we cannot be. One line sings: Tayo's mangagsiawit/ Habang ang mundo's tahimik."

Can't we just leave the night in silence and not consider its quietude the precondition for riot?