Why I’m in No Mood for Christmas

For me, dealing with the pandemic is a day by day experience. I arrived in Australia in February this year ready to smash the last semester of my master’s degree with a sparkly new addition to my CV. Going back to school at 30 was necessary because a few years prior, I had survived the mass retrenchment of the magazine industry in Manila, Philippines. My company was overhauled to keep up with journalism’s digitization. A guy from HR had pulled my dream job from under my feet and asked for all the office supplies back.

2020 was supposed to be my comeback, primped and ready to face the real world again with more internet know-how. But a little more than a week after I arrived in Sydney, Australia shut its borders. I attended five classes at the University of Sydney before we shifted to a Zoom classroom I attended from my dorm room in my jammies. This point became pivotal: returning home to the Philippines meant not being able to come back to Australia indefinitely, and weighing the pros and cons, I decided that it would be better to stay put. I watched friends leave not knowing when we could fly to see each other again. 

Now Christmas is a week away. I haven’t yet heard the music of Jose Mari Chan. I’ve only seen the trees shed their leaves, grow new ones, and flower, coming to terms with the fact that the four seasons have passed and I’m still scrolling through Instagram watching my home from afar.

The truth is, I’m having trouble thinking about Christmas. “What do you want to do for Christmas then,” asked my Persian friend who doesn’t even know what date it’s celebrated on, concerned that I keep stressing about how important Christmas is in the Philippines, but with no game plan in place to recreate it.

“I don’t know,” I said, “we’ll play it by ear.” As if Christmas was a pub crawl you could just wing on a weekend. So far, the only merrymaking I’ve done is getting sloshed with 20-somethings on espresso martinis on our rooftop. While lockdown laws were lifted in Sydney a while back, dancing was only reinstated recently. So dance we did … to a lot of ABBA.

But every time I call home, I see the disparity of where I am: dizzy dancing to 70s music and making sourdough, while my loved ones at home never leave the house without a face mask and shield (also making sourdough). There’s a shared indignation and helplessness that ties us all, but it’s still hard to marry the tension of our contrasting milieux. 

My mom and I will talk at length about plants. I think it's the only way that we're able to communicate. My Filipino-Chinese upbringing makes it hard to be forward about feelings, but we can talk in detail about how the philodendron billietiae adapted to the shock of being repotted from a near-death encounter with root rot. And how she, with her tending hands, managed to save it. I can’t help but think about my own roots and whether they need my mom’s tending hands too. But in her home, there is no tree, no Advent wreath, nor the four children she used to guilt-trip to sit around it to sing "O come, O come, Emmanuel'' a capella. Instead, the spirit of Christmas is captured best by the joy of COVID test results that have always returned negative.

“What are your plans for Christmas,” my older sister asked me on Facebook Messenger from Singapore, where she lives with her husband and her two children. Last week, her kids spent the night in the Jewel Changi Airport inside a tent in an initiative called “Glamping in the Clouds.” “Bopping around trying to recreate the warmth of home,” I joked.

An expert in Christmases away from home, my older sister, an academic, had spent many holidays in different countries. She belted out “Bizarre Love Triangle” on karaoke during winter in Syracuse and made a homemade parol (lantern) from their flat in Singapore. This year, her husband, an assistant professor, is organizing a “tsokolate at karaoke” event (hot chocolate and karaoke) and assembling lumpiang Shanghai (fried spring rolls) with Filipino students who are unable to return to their homes in the Philippines.

My boyfriend, working from home in Manila for about nine months now, will probably be nursing a soju highball on his couch watching Home Alone, and I’ll be on FaceTime watching him watch Home Alone. This has been the state of our love life so far. Only a bunny GIF can communicate the feeling of a hug. The most excitement we get is getting drunk together watching a Japanese reality show and I almost piss my pants while he makes me laugh. The Christmas spirit for him is waiting for his “13th month pay” bonus so that he can “buy so much shit” online. “Look what came in the maaaail,” he sang to me once via Telegram video, “it’s called a fermentation fermentation fermentation statiooon,” he said, pointing the camera to the new Kilner fermentation kit he bought for himself.

Somehow, we’ve made it through the year with bated breaths, and this timestamp in our lives will slowly recede into history — another “On This Day” we can repost on Instagram. Sure, we lost a year, but we’ve kept our shit together, albeit a breakdown here and there. This year, I’m not much in the mood for Christmas traditions, but I find comfort in filling it with the things I clung onto desperately during the darkest of times: long walks with friends along university grounds; longer talks over tea; the adobo, kare-kare, and sinigang that I and my younger sister, Sel, would whip up in our tiny kitchen to thwart homesickness; my yoga teacher telling me to “stop selling yourself short” and to “trust yourself more;” a leche flan donut; bread making; copious amounts of gin and tonic.

In a season where we can’t be in close contact with those we love, at least we can turn to the things that filled the void when the times were most uncertain, cherishing what they have taught us about ourselves and offered to us — a lot of consolation, and strength, and tenacity to not be overwhelmed by the pandemic. And a lot of bread.