Sadness doesn’t choose when. It cares not if it’s your anniversary with your girlfriend or if it’s your folks’. It cares not if you’re having the best day of your life because you finally hung out with friends you haven’t seen in months. Hell, sadness doesn’t even care if it’s the birthday of an almighty Deity. Nothing seems to be spared from the gaping emptiness sadness gifts to everything it encounters. Not even the divine.

Christmas time has always been something to look forward to, especially to us Filipinos who begin celebrating it as late as the first second of September. Just this year I witnessed our vice mayor blast Christmas In Our Hearts by Jose Mari Chan, the grand daddy of Filipino Christmas music. It was August 31, my dear readers. As the years went by, the Spirit of Christmas showed no signs of waning. Perhaps it was my fault for taking it for granted (really, it was just me lowkey expecting kickass gifts from my parents). Eleven years. Eleven blissful Christmases. The Spirit waned when I was 12, after having found out that there was no gift under the tree for me, and how that was a stark reality I had to accept and get used to from then on.

I didn’t adapt so well. Year after year, I was forced to witness the thing I loved slowly wither and die. Like a child who braved to see his first pet be ‘put down’, I was in pain. It was a pain that doesn’t sting but one that gnaws you from the inside until there is nothing left. It was this year when the Spirit died. Now I’m left carrying its corpse and to occasionally waving its lifeless body at people who cheerily greet “Merry Christmas!” The Spirit left but its body remained. “What do I do with it now?“, a recurring line from my daily monologue. This void left by the Spirit, sorrow immediately made its home. A soul-crushing remorse from Christmases past. It was a sadness unlike any other. A sadness so sly but made its presence know from the dread it loomed above my head. It threatened to swallow my sanity to the point that I can barely feel anything at all. Almost not even the sadness itself.

I contemplated, and contemplated, and contemplated. For days, I thought of nothing else but why. Why did I lose that joy? Why do I barely feel anything anymore? Why does this sadness crush me so greatly that there’s almost nothing left to feel? It was then when someone whispered materialism. It was the gifts. The Spirit waned when the gifts stopped coming. Maybe it wasn’t the Spirit of Christmas I was celebrating all this time. Maybe it was something different altogether.

“But as it took its last breath and left, I realized something that’s now slowly changing me.”

Those were long, grueling years in pursuit of a dying Spirit. But as it took its last breath and left, I realized something that’s now slowly changing me. For the better. I’m free. We’re free. Free to make meaning. It was when I realized this that I was able to free myself from the sadness that bound me to the past. We’re free to make our own traditions. We’re free to make new meaning for things. Gifts may stop coming. Surprises will stop…surprising us. People can leave. Families may not spend Christmas together (though hopefully not). But I tell you this, no matter how bad it gets, our happiness is in our hands and we are the ones to decide what makes us happy.

Merry Christmas! Chin up and keep smiling!