Friday, December 29, 2006

This is the worst Christmas ever.

Or perhaps the second worst. Last year's Christmas was downright torture.

I locked myself inside my room and snootily refused to join my family for noche buena (despite my Mom's nagging - which by the way made everything so much worse). The Espino father-daughter feud was at its height that time and I just couldn't bear to sit with my Dad on the same table, pretending to be a part of the 'family' when I felt like the unwanted illegitimate child. I felt like a rebel, in a good way. Kind of like the cool kids in movies who hated their parents and started drinking, and smoking, and taking drugs, and ditching school. Ok - at that time, THOSE things were cool for me.

This year, I spent 5 minutes on the table. A lousy improvement but an improvement nonetheless. I stuffed myself too much while cooking (the legendary tikim-tikims), and so my Christmas feast was an hour premature.

Anyway, I lost interest in Christmas. I guess it IS true that the season is only for children.

When I was a kid, I always had at least three presents under the tree. Now, we almost FORGOT to put up the tree. Had it not been for our maid who reminded us that we were supposed to put up a tree (apparently, it's an SOP for her), we never would have bothered. And oh yes, no gifts AT ALL. I only received money from my Mom, which I spent buying clothes for a party I went to. But what good is a Christmas present if it's not wrapped in shiny red wrapper with an equally shiny red ribbon?

We also didn't decorate the house this year with lights and other Christmas ornaments. Now, this is a totally big change since we spend half of our Christmas bonding as a family decorating the house. I always found it funny how my Dad would always compare our house to our next door neighbor's who could very well be a professional Christmas decorator or something. Yeah, our house looks like shit compared to their's but ours was done with love (shudder).

The food we had weren't as festive as last year's. We only had cheese sticks (which I proudly made), ham, mango pandan and dozens of brownies which were all from the cafeteria (eek!). Mom didn't even have the decency to cook rice.

I think our parents finally made up their minds that we were too old for Christmas, or perhaps old enough to know what Christmas really is.

Christmas is an excuse (a very famous one, might I add) to give children something to look forward to. It's the day they've stayed NICE for, throughout the whole year -- good kids get better presents from Santa.

You see, it's just another ordinary day that specializes in making non-children more miserable about growing old. And if you haven't figured that out yet, it's about time to grow up.

Merry Christmas to you. =/