Food Glorious Christmas Foods!

This is the title of one song we loved to sing as children after having watched the movie Óliver.  My sister Daisy even has an album on facebook with the same title.  I thought I better write also my thoughts about food.  After all it is Christmas season when every family gather together on a table to share meals.  What sort of meals, anyway?

I remember as children, we somehow had beautiful foods during  Noche Buena (translated literally as Good Night from Spanish to English, but words we used to refer to our Christmas Eve Celebration).


What I enjoyed most then was halaya ube  as pictured here (the picture extracted from Foodipino as I don't have any image of it simply because we don't normally have this now on our Noche Buena table).  I think this is one of the most delicious Filo food and it is fabulous even as topping on ice cream.  When we all visited Lola, our paternal grandmother each Christmas Day, I , and I believed all my siblings as well, always looked forward then to having halaya because our Lola cooked it the best and beyond compare-- not discrediting of course my big sisters who laboured so hard in the kitchen to serve this each Christmas Eve Celebration.


Another food I miss now during our Noche Buena was the Christmas chocolate  which my mother bought from the market to make us all hot chocolate drink. This chocolate was special because it isn't the instant Cadbury or Milo or Sustagen chocolate drink. As mother cooked Christmas chocolate,  Nimrod, primarily as well as all of us, could not help but savour in our nostrils its sweet aroma that filled our entire house.  I showed here a picture of a cup of chocolate which I extracted also from the internet and which was labelled cacao.  Am not quite sure whether what my mother bought from the market was called cacao.  As a kid, my only concern  then was to eat and enjoy food glorious Christmas foods.

The third food I also missed even  to this day was the chicken salad prepared Filipino way as pictured on the right (also an extract from the internet).  Of all the images, I think this one resembled what my mother and later on my big sisters prepared then.  Of course there were also other goodies like the chestnuts my father usually brought home and the queso de bola or chicken sandwiches our big sisters made. My siblings and I truly could not stop eating.  We loved to the last bits all our Christmas foods!!!




As a finale,  my siblings and I usually had this fruit salad (pictured here from our 2014 Noche Buena).  This salad is not quite the same as the ordinary fruit salad here in Sydney because it is rich, supersweet and delicious just like the usual Filipino fruit salad. Thanks to my sister Cyn who should be an expert in cooking and preparing Filipino foods, after graduating from the university with a food and nutrition degree.

My siblings and I grew up with the foods pictured above as highlights of our Christmas Eve Celebration year after year, not to mention the other foods  such as   ham,  which my father usually got as a gift from work, the chicken adobo cooked by our mother, should we want to eat rice instead of or in addition to bread,  and the hot chicken macaroni soup which our mother also cooked for us.  As December had always been a cooler month in our native country, the soup and the hot chocolate drink were beautifully suitable to warm also our hearts.  Praise be to God for our parents who made our Christmases memorable and beautiful for us year after year!


Truly, I miss the simplicity of the Christmas foods we had in the past back in our own country of origin.  Now,  that we all have migrated to an affluent country, it is truly amazing that our Noche Buena table has been like those pictured in magazines....however, I still miss the old, golden days of halaya, chicken salad and Christmas chocolate.   I am not complaining!!! What I am trying to get across here is there is nothing wrong to have all the festive and elaborate Noche Buena but I really believe, it is always beautiful to go back to your beginnings---once in awhile. 

Below are some photos of our Christmas season's celebration here in Sydney.

Finally, and it is worth mentioning, the most important feature and symbolic of our Christmas celebrations from time immemorial has always been the cake with the inscription on it  "Happy Birthday Jesus." 

After all, Christmas is not about food but about Jesus--God's Greatest Gift to mankind and the Bread of Life.

Life was beautiful then....and I miss it!

Am sitting in this floral chair by the glass door that opens to the courtyard.  This is now my favourite part in my house. Here I can relax and reflect, and sometimes step back in time...

 

Yes, I had found rest--finally from the hustle and bustle of my many roles in life.  This began when I looked after my elderly and sick mother on a full time basis and somewhat seemed to have ended  since she passed away.

 

No more striving. No more frustration. No more tension. No more drama.  Why? When I migrated to Australia, I found it not an easy road to establish my science career. No, had it not been through God's grace.

 

I was ready then to start again at the bottom when I got called to work as a clerk at the Maritime Services Board. Just as I was about to accept this job offer, however,  I was offered a scholarship to do a Ph D.

 

There was tenure in the clerk position compared with the scholarship offer.  My brother Nimrod, however, put strongly to me the options:1) would I want to start at the bottom as clerk 1 and go my way up to senior clerk position or 2) wouldn't I want to continue my way up to my already established science career.

 

I certainly chose what was closer to my heart...and the rest was history.

 

As I have learned over the years, however, life is constantly changing.

 

I left my science career and became a carer of my mother and at the same time became a contractor court and health care interpreter,  besides doing at times translation and voice over taping jobs.

 

I was happy then---to subsume my academic ambition in the priceless privilege of looking after THE one person, aside my father, who put me in the first place, to go up in the ladder of academic success.

 

Now I am alone in this chair where I feel sad and  at the same time find solace.

 

The sun's about to die.  Around me is peace and quiet.  I am listening, yes to the sound of silence...

 

I wish I could hear once more my mother's loving voice.  I wish I could hear her sweetly call me "Anak,"  just like she did one time when I snoozed in the two-seater sofa while she sat on the armchair next to it.  She said in the vernacular, "It's good you had a snooze...were you comfortable lying on that sofa?" Her voice sounded satisfied and happy.  She knew I was a one-man band. She knew I was working nonstop around the house and garden. She knew also I always slept late.  Yes, it was good for me to have a snooze then.

 

As I slid the door along the track to close it before the sun finally goes down, I could still feel on my skin the summer-scented air through the screen door. I settled once more on the chair and looked outside in a meditation mood...

 

I used to be inspired greatly by the various textures and colours of my garden. In my vivid imagination, I tried to picture the rustic romance of countryside I was hoping to achieve ultimately as I continued to garden.  I reminisced the simplicity of the past summers my Mum and I had.

 

Ah, I didn't realise my coffee had gone cold. Suddenly it came to my mind the hot pancakes I used to make for Mum and I as we sipped the time away.  It was like ages ago since I had not made pancakes. I have just been eating cereals if not sandwiches or fruits.  I lost the interest in cooking. I do not have to cook so much now. My medical conditions are not as critical and complicated as Mum's.  Whatever nutrients  I lack from what I eat  now, I supplement by drinking up two glasses of  hospital grade Sustagen I buy from the chemist.

 

Just as I about to go up the four steps to go the kitchen to make pumpkin flower patties with beaten eggs to bring to work tomorrow, I spotted the different colours of geranium which I snipped from the garden early in the morning.  I used to bring inside the house single or massive blooms from the garden for Mum to enjoy in the night. I still do it now in my loving memory of her.

 

Yes, life was beautiful then.. and I miss it!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Memoirs--Friday Sunsets and Tatang

(The following is  a page in my record of Our Life Together as Blanco Family  which I started to write in the early 1990s.  It is my pleasure to share and write about my beloved grandfather who was a vital influence to me in reading the Bible regularly. The image of him reading the Bible day in and day out has been permanently imprinted in my mind).

O

n Friday sunsets, Tatang, my maternal grandfather,  usually gathered all of us in the spacious living room of my aunt whom my siblings and I fondly called Ima.  There we all prayed and sang hymns before and after Tatang's exposition on the Bible. After the closing prayer, we all kissed the hands of my grandparents, uncles, aunties and our respective parents.

Tatang and Inang

 

This gathering was always followed by feasting on the long white covered dulang [table] of native foods and cakes and lengthy talks by all the adults.
 

We could not appreciate then the beauty of this gathering.  It was only when Daisy and I became SDA in the later years that we were able to understand its meaning.  Tatang was observing the seventh day Sabbath, the day which is meant to be a memorial between God and mankind during Creation.

Tatang was a devout SDA.  He believed in Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord, whom we now know to be the prime reason for our celebrations. He read the Bible day and night.  This was a common knowledge to all of us.  We always saw him on the rocking chair at the balcony of Ima’s house reading the Bible.  He had done this while his hair was black till it became salt and pepper and then all grey.  He went to church every Saturday.
 

Tatang abounded in good works.  He healed people with asthma, muscular pain and pilay [dislocated joints] by his gift of hilot [this term sort of equivalent to physiotherapy].  This good deed became known from people within or outside the neighbourhood.  Not surprisingly thence, people came to his house to seek healing.
 

Tatang did not accept payment from any of the people who came to him.  He always quoted in the vernacular the Bible verse “freely you have received, freely give.” However, these people came back, oftentimes, with fruits and vegetables to give Tatang.  It was funny, though, a few of them also came to ask Tatang for our home-grown vegetables and fruits.

Tatang actively served God then as elder in SDA church in Lerma. Caloocan City.  This church also had a school where few of my siblings and I went at some stage. 
 

Tatang was also the foreman during the building of the Philippine Union College at Baesa, Novaliches [now called Adventist University of the Philippines but relocated in Silang Cavite].
 

Unlike the overly fanatic SDAs, however Tatang was not absolutely an Ellen G. White enthusiast.  As his English skills was not as fluent as his Spanish, he asked Kapatid na Kiko {Brother Kiko] to translate parts of the writings of Ellen G. White.
 

To other people in the neighbourhood, Tatang was a man with exemplary character.  He and Inang begot Tata ⁴⁴Doming, Kaka⁴⁵ Pacing, Tata Pepe, Tata Berting, my mother, Tata Juan and Ima.  To their children, Tatang was a godly, loving, caring and respectable father. For us his grandchildren, he was simply our loving grandfather.  Rarely did we see him get angry.  Instead of getting angry, he read the appropriate Bible verse in disciplining us.