X'mas spoiler

HEAR YE, hear ye. The City of San Fernando calls: “All roads lead again to Robinsons Starmills Pampanga on December 15 for the annual Giant Lantern Festival pitting aesthetic and technical skills of the city’s acclaimed lantern makers.

Also called “Ligligan Parul”, the much-awaited event centers on a competition that has been a showcase of the 104-year-old tradition of lantern making in the City. 
The festival attracts thousands of tourists, both local and foreign, to an evening of kaleidoscopic displays of light and color from giant Christmas lanterns produced by craftsmen from San Fernando’s barangays aiming for the coveted “best lantern” award…”
Showcasing tradition. Pitting aesthetic and technical skills of craftsmen. Attracting thousands of foreign and local tourists. 

The City of San Fernando’s Giant Lantern Festival has long arrived as the signature festival not only of the city but of the whole Kapampangan race indeed. Though its sense – the very reason for the season it celebrates – is dead and, not so much for the worse, done with.

With its grand spectacle of flashing multi-colored lights, the Giant Lantern Festival reduced, aye, trivialized the Christmas Star.

Pray, who still know the meaning of the Christmas lantern? Tell, who cares?

I remember my high school theology professor – the then-Rev. Fr. Paciano B. Aniceto – lecturing that the Christmas lantern took after the Star of Bethlehem that pointed to where the Christ was born and thereby guided both lowly shepherds and majestic magi to the manger.

Hence – the good Apu Ceto explained – wherever the Christmas lantern is hoisted, posted or hung, there the Christ is, there His love is. The lantern being the Star’s representation.
Thus, of all the symbols of Christmas – from mistletoes and Christmas trees to Santa Claus and the snowman – it is the lantern that has the greatest, if not the only, theological value – the sublime symbolism of love, the greatest manifestation of God’s love born man to redeem mankind.

Are we even remotely aware of this when we ooh and aah in wonderful glee at the giant lanterns’ kaleidoscopic plays?

“And the people bowed and prayed, to the neon gods the made…” Simon and Garfunkel sounding as prophets there.
A Christmas past I feel, writing all about this? Unarguably, making myself the miserly Scrooge or the wily Grinch stealing the X’mas present of frenzied shopping rush causing all those monstrous traffic jams around the malls, of compulsive consumption, offered as it were, at capitalism’s unholy shrines, of the attendant cacophony of sounds – from the consumer noise to the piped-in carols – fading below the din of tinkling cash registers, sweet, sweet music to the Forbes’ listers ears.

Without the Christ, there’s only X’mas utterly secularized. There’s only X’mas crassly commercialized.

Call me the sanctimonious killjoy, the X’mas spoiler. 

So we sing “Joy to the world” with all our hearts.
So what lord has come to us?