List of Holiday Thoughts

December is my favourite month of the year. The reasons are quite obvious. It’s my birthday month and it features a series of many fun events: Christmas and other Christmas-related events, Christmas vacation, get-togethers with friends, New Year’s Eve and other year-end endeavours. All the best and warmest moments and occasions are unusually crammed up in this month that a ‘cold December’ is obviously not preferred, haha.

Aside from all the merry euphoria that Christmas brings with the month, one particular thing about December that I love is that it’s the perfect time for introspection. Well, it’s pretty much default because after all, December is actually the last month of the year. It’s not like you summarize your year in the middle part, hehe.

So for this month’s column, here’s a list of my Holiday thoughts. It’s just a mishmash of what has happened in the month so far and what new things I have realized the past year. So here it goes!

Happy Birthday to moi! Like what I mentioned from my own blog post in my own blog, my birthday itself was pretty ordinary, as it fell on a Sunday. It wasn’t entirely uneventful though. A couple of high school friends surprised me in the evening with a cake. I wasn’t really all sad that I am getting ‘old’ when I turned 24. You know what my major realization was? It’s that given my 24 years of life so far, I have spent a third of it (8 years) in UP and Aguman. Indeed, our organization has been a definitive part of my life.

Happy 35th Anniversary, AguPIPS! And speaking of UP Aguman, we (Records) won again in the Mutya. Woot! Hehe! Funny how the other committees were just resigned to competing for 2nd Place. Haha! Joke. Looking at the all the produced costumes, talent performances and the witty antics from all 6 contestants, I think that overall, this year’s contest was bigger and better. I just have one suggestion for next year though: alternate “Mutya” with “Lakan”, so that the novelty of the concept will not easily fizzle out. Or else, it will just turn into some sort of unofficial right of passage for new male members. Anyway, cheers to more successful and mighty years for UP Aguman! Not for ourselves alone.

It's party time! I’ve attended two holiday get-togethers so far and there’s another that’s coming up. Both parties I’ve been to were exhausting, literally and figuratively, haha. Only with smart friends would you expect drinking parties that celebrate the gift of knowledge and sharp memory, not to mention affinity for all things that are popularly jologs or baduy, haha!


This year, I prepared the dessert instead of the main pasta course for our family's Noche
Buena. It's a two-tier Strawberry Cheesecake (pictured left), a better version of the one I
served during the 34G Christmas Break Party after the Lantern Parade (pictured right).
How I managed to 20+ people inside our humble KNL apartmen is beyond me, haha!

It's the warm and fuzzy time of the year. There are a few things that weren’t as special as last year. I wasn’t able to finish decorating the house – in fact it’s barely decorated at all, haha. I never attended a single Simbang Gabi. But for the most part, it was still a merry Christmas. My parents’ passports were cleared just in time to make their flight back home. Our refrigerator and cabinets are roomfuls of different goodies! Haha! – which took its toll on my pants and shorts. I am seriously considering induced vomiting, haha!

Christmas Day itself was a letdown. We went home to our grandparents’ house at Sta Rita and Porac, and the atmosphere wasn’t festive at all. It wasn’t even about the food or different pastries that our relatives cook for Christmas. Most of my cousins, aunts and uncles weren’t around. When I was younger, the good ol’Dizon manor was always ‘filled up to the rafters’ during Christmas. There weren’t any bare corners in the house because all the kids would be running around and the older cousins would hang out and catch up on each other’s lives. But for the past few years, going home to my grandparents was becoming less and less of a tradition for most of our relatives. Of course, sooner and later in our lives, we would be having our own lives and that the time will come when our own house will be the grandparents’ house that we and our respective children will go home to for the holidays. But I just feel that it’s happening too soon.

It's time to look back at the year that was. I am probably gonna start writing down my year-end reflection around the 31st or the 30th. But for the purpose of this column post, I am gonna do some initial rumination.

The past year has been pretty much like the previous years: still shaky. Annual life-low-points seem to be becoming the story of my life, haha. But the wonderful thing about major downs in one’s life is that it is always followed by major ups. You just have to hang on and ride the storm out – even if you think you’re too weak to do so. If there’s one sure thing I’ve learned from my own personal tragedies is that I am stronger than what I think I am.

I will end the year with not much life status changes. I am just worth an additional year of valuable experience. Some old lessons just need to be learned over and over again. Haha!