25/12/2025
Returning Home to a Changed Self
Christmas has a way of turning us into travelers whether or not we ever leave from the city to go back to our province. . But for those who have moved to the city for college or work, the return carries a different kind of weight. Each December, we pack bags filled with clothes, our laptops still full of half-finished readings, and a tired heart – and then we go home. Not just to a place, but to an earlier version of ourselves waiting somewhere between the familiar streets and the doorway we grew up walking through.
As children, Christmas lived in our bones. It was the countdown scribbled on the last page of a school notebook, the trembling excitement of Christmas parties at school where we wore red or green and waited for our names to be called for exchanging gifts, the nights when Lolo and Lola started to hang lights by the door, the inability to sleep because morning meant hot chocolate, p**o maya, visiting cousins, games, and food we tasted only once or twice a year. It was the rustle of gift wrappers and the scent of cheap perfume and freshly baked polvoron tucked into paper bags. Back then, everything sparkled because our worlds were small enough for wonder to overflow.
December meant caroling until voices grew hoarse, knocking on neighbors’ gates with improvised tambourines and empty cans, hoping for coins or candy. It meant staying up late for Simbang Gabi or Misa de Gallo, half-asleep but warm in borrowed jackets, rewarded with p**o bumbong and bibingka afterward. Christmas felt endless then – each day stretched with anticipation, each night glowing with promise.
But growing up stretches that world. The city becomes our second home – busy, loud, and full of expectations. University shapes us in ways we don’t fully notice until we come back home and realize we’ve changed. What once felt huge and endless suddenly looks and feels smaller. Rooms feel quieter. Streets feel shorter. And Christmas… it feels softer, quieter, and different.
Time has thinned out the innocence we wore so naturally. The thrill we carried as children fades into something contemplative. We begin to understand why our parents were exhausted by December, why adults looked at Christmas lights with a nostalgia we dismissed. Now we know: Christmas is not only joy – it is also memory, longing, and the ache of everything that will no longer feel the same.
And yet, every year, something tender happens.
We see children – nieces, nephews, the neighbors’, and children – running toward Christmas with the same old and wild excitement we once had. Their joy becomes a mirror reflecting back the younger selves we thought we had outgrown. In their laughter, in their parol-making, their early-morning eagerness, we find pieces of us left behind when we stepped into adulthood and city life.
Through them, we are reminded of the past that always comes back to kiss our faces through the lights of Christmas decorations.
Their bright eyes shine at simple things: a neatly wrapped box, a lit tree, p**o bumbong and hot chocolate steaming in the cold air, and the promise of something magical at dawn. Through them, Christmas feels familiar again – not loud or glittering, but warm, steady, and quietly alive.
Growing older doesn’t take the season away from us; it simply changes how it touches us. The joy we once held for ourselves deepens into gratitude for others. The excitement becomes a quiet reflection. The magic turns into meaning.
And in that quiet, as we stand between who we were and who we’ve become, something in us softens – and the season settles into us like a memory teaching us how to breathe again.
—
Literary by Judeia Lourdes DeLa Victoria
Visual by Blaire Caldevilla
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