Hopscotching holidays

This is my first Christmas in two years!

If you're wondering where I was the last two Christmases, I myself am wondering how I handled skipping it. Twice.

Well, I was hiding in the newsroom. Not that it's a game one likes to play but I had to work during the busier holidays. And the latter phrase makes me sound like a physician on call.

Yes we were always on call and my schedule back in ABS-CBN was Saturday to Wednesday, and though Christmas almost always falls on a Thursday or a Friday which are my off-days, I wouldn't enjoy Christmas eve or day fresh out of work or with a work-laden mind. Would you?

Though they weren't normal Christmases, I was excited just the same. A notch higher actually because of the possibility of getting seen on TV when the producers decide to set up a camera in the newsroom and allow us make stupid of ourselves by waving at the camera for reasons heaven knows what. And much to our disappointment and embarrassment for hoping such foolishness, no camera setup came.

And then arrived the New Years during which time it's confirmed we'll be seen on TV. By whom? By all people who are too busy watching fireworks displays to be watching TV at that time! I even had to make calls to friends and family to tell them I'm wearing so and so color so they can spot me amongst the news crew and staff frantically amused at this fleeting moment of assumed popularity as if their faces will be etched on the screen for everyone to remember. Sigh.

Just the same, it was a consolation. If, on Christmas eve, we'd be crying silently in the restroom or our cubicles for missing the Christmas dinner at home, we're ecstatic on New Year's eve. It was a prize for working on a holiday. But I guess it's really not true the belief that whatever you do on the first day you'll be doing the rest of the year. We were on TV for fragments of seconds on January 1 but never again thereafter. (Well, except as a blurry background of ANC's newscast.)

Like some game of fate, my parents and two of my sisters are abroad, which leaves me and my Ate Joan and Ate Weng (who is married, by the way, and stays in her Antipolo house with husband Clint) putting up the holiday tree and spreading the holiday feast on the mahogany table, just when I am ready to have my first Christmas again.

Thank God there's Christmas every year.

Happy Holidays everyone!