Captain’s Blog

It’s December 24 and it’s almost midnight. Something strange is happening in our house this year. For once, Christmas in the Miranda household is generally tranquil and silent. It’s a weird and eerie feeling. After all, we Mirandas are used to a Christmas that is normally noisy. You see when you have six siblings and an easily agitated mother preparing for Noche Buena you tend to stress each other out to the point that you wind up fighting and screaming due to the many details that need to be attended to. You proclaim a ceasefire before mass and then resume the screaming after. Common lines are:

“Hey, who’s getting the ice!?!”
“Puwede bang bilisan, I want to open presents na!”
“Hoy! Bantayan yung manok! Baka sunog na!”
“Jenny tama na ang telebabad! We eat as a family!!!”
“Mom, relax!”
“Paano ako magrerelax? Ang dami pang kailangan gawin!”

These are the sounds of Christmas that I have come to miss. Many people’s absences are sorely felt. First is that of my mom who passed away in February this year. Followed by my siblings all moving to the US to be with my father. So this is a lonely Christmas of sorts for Kristine and me. Our plan was to check into a hotel and spend our first holidays alone there but my darling sister has work so that plan was scrapped.

Anyway this is a surreal Christmas indeed. After the simbang gabi wherein you meet and greet the entire parish we set on home. We had a modest noche buena with some rhum coke, cheese, hams and wine. Then we opened presents. My sister and I looked at each other with teary eyes and reminisced a time when our family was complete. Then we realized upon opening our presents how much we’ve grown to love each other.

For those of you that know my family history, Kris has always been my mortal foe. That sibling you just don’t get along with. But in the time that changes occured in our family, we grew close to one another through adversity and learned to understand one another. When we gave our gifts to one another we hugged and those hugs communicated all the love we ever needed to communicate.

True, our family will never be 100% complete even if Kris and I follow in the US. Mom is in heaven now so that chapter of Miranda family completeness is over. But despite the fact that we are physically separated I guess this Christmas helped remind us that at the end of the day it is love that binds this family together.

I look forward to the day when we can celebrate Christmas again as one big happy family. All screaming and stressing each other out. Silent nights have never been my bag of tea anyway.

So to all of you guys out there let me greet you:

FELIZ NAVIDAD!
JOYEAUX NOEL!
FELIC NADAL!
SHEN DAN KUAI LEI!
MERRY CHRISTMAS!
MALIGAYANG PASKO!

May God bless you all!

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 24th, 2006 at 8:25 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.