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My Turn by Maileen Hamto

From The Asian Reporter, V19, #49 (December 15, 2009), page 6.

The holiday season never fails to awaken some of my earliest experiences of being a "minority."

Let me explain. I spent the formative years of my life in the Philippines, a country that prides itself in being one of the first Christianized nations in Asia. When I was growing up, 85 percent of the population was Roman Catholic, a legacy of Spanish conquistadores and friars who ruled the islands for more than 300 years.

Many of the country’s major holidays center on the church. It’s not uncommon for families to have "Saint of the Day" calendars posted on refrigerator doors. The season of Lent in March and April is filled with solemn activities. When I was growing up, even television programming changed dramatically during Holy Week. Variety shows and "teleseryes" (Filipino version of daytime soaps) were replaced with films depicting the life of Jesus Christ.

Large metropolitan centers in Luzon and Visayas are strongholds of the Catholic Church. I’m not sure if this still goes on, but when I was attending public high school in Manila, a mass was held on school grounds every last Friday of the month.

I wasn’t raised a Catholic. During their college days, my parents broke away from the church to join a relatively young and growing church merging elements and teachings of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and other protestant Christian denominations.

Everything the Catholic Church was, my parents’ church wasn’t. We didn’t participate in any of the holy days celebrated by the mainstream church. That meant no Lent, no Easter, no "Todos Los Santos," or All Saints’ Day.

No Christmas.

No Christmas because it wasn’t in the Bible. No Christmas because historians and astronomers agree Jesus could not have been born during the winter. The night sky, as recorded by witnesses, more closely resembled a crisp spring eve.

As a child, my default response to any invitation that was even remotely Catholic was: "No, thanks. I’m part of this church, you see. We don’t do that sort of thing."

Because I couldn’t take part in a large number of activities everyone else was doing, it was easy to learn how to firmly say no at an early age. When you’ve been taught that the consequences of straying from one’s faith involve an eternity in hell, peer pressure is nary an issue.

Church people would come to the house weekly to check on things, pray for the household, and make sure everybody was okay and in line. Although we could not put up anything that looked like Christmas in our home, I experienced bits and pieces of traditional Catholic Christmas celebrations at my late grandmother’s house. She always put up a tree, complete with ornaments and blinking multi-colored lights. It was a rather innocuous but guilty pleasure: Enjoying Christmas in silence — transfixed by the beauty of lights dancing — for hours on end. I guess even back then I was easily entertained.

To compensate for the lack of Jesus in our holidays, my parents introduced my brother and me to the secular symbol of Santa Claus. Apparently, believing in a big guy in a red suit who rides around the world in a sleigh pulled by reindeer is less threatening than the divine birth.

I grew up, left the church, and became a free agent. It took a mere four years living in the U.S. to break free from the confines of the church-cult that demonized everything outside its domain.

But here’s the real paradox. Although the teachings and methods of the church bordered on brainwashing, being part of a religious minority left many important gifts. Living on the fringes has made it easier to imagine one’s self outside the mainstream. Reared on challenging the establishment, it became second nature to question authority, identify with the "underdog," and think and act independently.

Come to think of it, the whole experience of being a minority was important preparation for my eventual life as an émigré in America. Here, where individualism reigns supreme, going against the grain is usually seen as a positive trait.

And I have a childhood filled with quiet (covert) Christmases to thank for that.