The Filipino in Ber
WE'RE getting through the first Ber month, September, until the last and celebratory month of the birth of Christ in December. The Filipino's Ber months season is said to be the longest festive charm in the world. What's so Filipino about the Ber months? “Ber” is the suffix of the words that are the names of the last four months in the year---September, October, November and December. It's the preparation for the celebration of the Christmas season when Filipinos make out much of a happy outlook to build on the next year. Christmas officially starts on Dec. 16 with the Misa de Gallo but the preparations in this country begin in September, the first Ber month.
There's Christmas music in September, for one, and the people love to sing. There is the start of putting up the Christmas decorations in parks and streets, the sight delightful and the glitter at night of celebratory lights saluted. Filipinos love sales in the malls as the season builds up in the Ber months. People also wake up early preparing for the nine-day dawn mass weeks ahead even as carolers near Christmas stay up late singing their heart out at your door.
I experienced Christmas season out of the country only once and that was in New York in my few trips outside the country. Even just a week before Christmas, there was no sign of the season, I felt I was in the wrong place or I didn't look well enough. Perhaps it was Christmas a few days early in the malls where there were Christmas gift items and pine trees for sale.
I was looking for Christmas in New York.
But you can find an early Christmas celebration of Christ's birth in places where Filipinos in the U.S. live, said a friend. In a drive to a village one evening in Miami, Florida for dinner in a friend's house, we passed by houses lighted up as in a holiday. Even our friend's front door was glowing. Our host friend said if you get to see homes lighted up, they're mostly Filipino houses celebrating Christmas, happy even if hurting inside out of missing home. Some Pinoys have turned the setting up of lights into good business, it's so much in a sense of“Kumusta, compare, Merry Christmas diha, you want lights?.”
On the day before Christmas, our host led us to a church somewhere in Manhattan where a Holy Mass was celebrated in the afternoon, a Mass not on the eve of Christmas on December 25 at midnight but hours earlier than the Filipino tradition. There were very few people attending, I felt homesick for the churches back home where the Holy Day mass is held daily at dawn before Christmas for everyone in town. I felt so strange I decided to spend the rest of the New Year back home in Cebu instead of in New York after a stay of two months in the U.S.
There's something about Filipino culture that I know is stuck in me. I made sure I got a flight back to Manila and Cebu just before the New Year's Eve for the familiar sight, the fireworks New Year smell and the strong sense of home. I arrived at the Cebu airport in the ‘80s just before the New Year's Eve celebratory mass and really spent the rest of the evening listening to the fireworks until I slept after the long, happy day.
Yes, I understand the power of the Ber months. September to Filipinos is a special month for being the beginning of the longest Christmas season celebration in the whole world.
The reasons why the Ber months are welcomed by Filipinos is the natural shift in the weather through the years when the torrid summer heat is diminished with the coming of the soft rains. But that was during normal times when the weather in the world was predictable. In these days, we don't have the old weather charm—tornadoes could dispel Christmas singing, put off lights and flood off carolers. Still, take it from a Filipino—the celebratory spirit prevails. Welcome to the second Ber month! “Pasko na!”