how the pinoy mess up Christ-mas

Away from the manger or (How the Pinoy mess up Christ-mas)

By DAVID CASUCO

I was at my friend's house when an irreverent Filipino Christmas song "Pasko Na Sinta Ko" blared out from the Filipino Channel on TV. Almost instantaneously my friends sitting around the table melted with intense nostalgia, wittingly referred to by a pundit as "the longing to go back to the old days when you were neither good nor old."

And while they were busy reminiscing, I excused myself and checked my emails on a computer notebook nearby. They noticed my indifference and asked me, "Are you not touched by the song? Don't you feel nostalgic? Didn't you experience as a kid looking forward to Christmas morning when toys and goodies are yours for the picking?"

I searched for one good answer, but couldn't find one. Then I remembered that when I was a kid my brother told me that Santa Claus is a hoax. I thought that was a rude awakening, because Christmas didn't have special meaning to me after that. I would say surviving Christmas became had been my cup of tea.

Until some twelve years ago when Christmas became a big deal to me once more. That time, I learned the true meaning of Christmas from a different point of view. It's amazing to think that it took me a great part of my lifetime to learn the real meaning of Christmas. Well, what did I learn? I learned that Christmas is all about a birth of a Savior who reconciled man to God. And that the Savior, Jesus, is all that the humankind needs. That is because the biggest problem in the world is sin and not the usual problems that people complain every day like bad traffic, obesity and cholesterol-laden foods, racial stereotyping, terrorist’s threat, and the stratospheric price of gas.

But catching the spirit of the season with a Gary V song that celebrates the pain of a broken relationship? Nah. That is definitely not Christmas-like. I thought that’s very lame.

Today, we have over-commercialized the true meaning of Christmas and embraced an irreverent way of celebrating it. Even our Christmas songs have become personal like the "Pasko na Sinta Ko," or politically correct like “Silver and Gold.” Gone are the carols that are loaded with task theology like "Oh Holy Night" and "Oh Little Town of Bethlehem." Truly, we have veered “away from the manger” to the “city sidewalks, busy sidewalks” where the air is filled with the aroma of “chesnuts roasting on an open fire.” That is where most of us are, right now, in our understanding about Christmas.

A few years back when I was in Bible College in Los Angeles, my instructor in Hermeneutics, who was once a Christian missionary in Mindanao, was telling the class about the Filipinos singing “Whispering Hope” as a Christmas carol. He said he was shocked because here in America that song is a funeral dirge. He asked me to confirm his observation and I said, “Yes, we do that.”

When I got home I wrote the song and checked why the professor said “Whispering Hope” is not a Christmas song. True enough, I found out that the song is unmistakably as sorrowful as death itself. Again, another distinct Pinoy mess-up. How that song got integrated into the Pinoys carol list, I don’t have any clue.
My point is, when it comes to giving honor to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, we don’t need to be socially, culturally, or politically correct. As Christian believers we have to be biblical.