Of holiday season gifts

Every year, the dedicated staff at the Tribune would ask if they could include my name in their exchange gifts. Every year, too, I would politely ask for exclusion.

It isn’t that I am anti-social or anything of that sort. It’s just that however the most festive part of the year that begins with Thanksgiving Day, the days of Christmas bring back vivid memories of Christmas past growing up in abject poverty in the old village.

Those were the days when most pupils would head home for Christmas vacation with small Red Cross boxes filled with gifts. It includes pencils, pencil sharpeners, aluminum tops, small red balls, marbles, tiny cars, etc. For many of us, that was Christmas gift from St. Nick.

We would stop by neighborhoods and wage our new marbles from Santa. It could be a messy competition. You aim at the center of the ring and hope for a clean-out while wiping your nose from sinusitis. Never mind that it hangs out halfway between your nostrils and upper lips. You’re permitted to use your forearms as temporary hankies. Then rub it against your shirt or pants as you go home to work on house chores a victor or villain.

It’s a good thing to have exchange gifts provided that the teacher sees the anxiety or imposition he or she places on the lower rung of her students. I mean, I’ve missed all six years of class Christmas party because my parents can’t afford the $.25 cents contribution. What makes the teacher thinks most of us can afford something over a quarter in gifts? Since then, I’ve come to despise gift exchanges anywhere it is presented in group functions. Nah, dump it in the deepest trenches of the Marianas. Got nothing to lose, yeah?

• • • • •

The first family here–parents and siblings–have made it sort of a family tradition to collect all gifts right before Christmas and give them to children at CHC on Christmas Day. I thought that is really very heartwarming! There’s that sense of community to extend a hand to hospitalized kids on this day.

If only the more fortunate ones could do likewise, no one has to endure one helluva “blue” Christmas on a supposed most festive of events throughout the Christian world. The first family deserves our accolades for their ultra-sense of compassion for the less fortunate. Eh, you can be one of those famous Three Kings, yeah? Be generous this Holiday Season!

• • • • •

I spent one Christmas at Kapiolani Children’s Hospital when my son was Medicaid a week after birth. The out-pouring of that sense of care and compassion from doctors, nurses, social workers, etc. somehow eased the fear that gripped this soul more than half the time. I probed my son’s fate to the hilt but didn’t get anywhere. It was like trying to fit the entire Pacific Ocean in half a coconut shell. I accepted nature’s sometimes unusual quirk of fate.

The Honolulu Cancer Society bought one ukulele for a cancer patient from here the night before Christmas. The kid asked that I play it with Christmas songs from home. I did. It was his last Christmas and I was so devastated when the kid succumbed to cancer. That was quite an experience–the strange twists and turns of our fate–even during the Holiday Season. Hey, have a good one! We only pass through this deep valley once, yeah?