It's 5:15 in the afternoon just days away from Christmas. I have two juicy slabs of cheap steak marinating in peppercorns and Knorr liquid seasoning. The living room lights are blazing because the rain brought on an early gloomy darkness. Our fireplace is lit. My son is busy trash talking with friends on CS Go on the PC Gaming rig that we put together as our Christmas gift to each other. He complains about the lag as he gets shot again. I can hear him while I am on the balcony, watching the fog roll over the Baguio cathedral with a chilled beer in my hand that I will be nursing until sunset. It's going to be another cold night.
We've spent many of our Christmas seasons here this way—away from the hustle and bustle of Manila, away from most people we know. It's been our way of disconnecting and taking time out from the stress of the season and the stress of the big city. Last year, we finally got ourselves an apartment in Baguio and began to call this place home. This is us. And this is Christmas for our single parent and solo child family.
The whole Baguio Christmas ritual for our family really began in 2006. I was having a difficult time piecing myself back together after a failed marriage and the daunting task of raising a two-year-old boy on my own was weighing me down. Friends and family were worried about us because it was our first Christmas on our own and wanted to make sure we were surrounded with love and support for the holidays—but I would have none of it.
While it is still my most favorite time of the year, the Christmas holidays are bittersweet for me. It began in my early teen years when I started to resent that my birthday fell on Christmas eve. It wasn't about being teased about just receiving one gift both for Christmas and my birthday—giving and receiving gifts has never been my love language. I felt bad that many people seemed to forget it was my birthday because everyone would be rushing doing last-minute preparations and even my closest friends wouldn't have time for me. When I was married, it got even more complicated. Not only did I have to spare time for my family for our noche buena, but I also had to rush to my in-laws as well because they had a noche buena tradition, too. You can imagine how difficult that was for an introvert who finds all social interactions exhausting.
And so it was against that backdrop that when my family and friends wanted me to do things on Christmas eve in 2006, I left Manila in a huff and decided to spend Christmas and my birthday up in the mountains and away from people.
Baguio is the perfect place for a comfortable unplanned getaway that's far enough from people you would know but near enough to a big bad mall that you can thumb your nose at but secretly go to when you need a good hardware store or computer store. It has a great selection of locally grown restaurants for every budget and preference and a decent selection of places to stay. Most importantly, it has a revered craft brewery with a speakeasy style cocktail bar hidden in the same building. On that trip, Beeto and I stayed in one of the bed and breakfast places on Leonard Wood. A work acquaintance insisted on inviting us over to celebrate Christmas with her family in Teacher's Camp and we spent the midnight hour huddled around a bonfire and telling stories under the starry sky with the pine trees all around us. It was a simple, back to the basics celebration of Christmas.
Since then, we've made it a point to come up to Baguio every Christmas season, just like my family did when I was growing up in the ‘80s. Our family had a sizeable unit in the venerable Europa condominiums on Legarda Road and, back then, we would come up to Baguio three or four times a year and stay for weeks at a time whenever our school schedules would allow it. Dad and mom would eat at Dainty on Session Road, and we would spend all our money on bike rides in Burnham. Mom would buy us Asterix comic books in Bookmark as her way of apologizing to us for making us get Igorot style haircuts at Koken Barbershop.
The great earthquake of 1990 changed all that and we stopped coming up. In fact, many Manila families who used to often come up just stopped coming altogether, as other vacation spots like Tagaytay and Batangas and Subic and Boracay suddenly seemed more interesting and had more to offer. In 1992, I visited with my college organization for a five day Ignatian retreat at the Mirador Jesuit Villa. A particularly strong storm hit us on the fifth day and we were forced to stay on for another week, marooned with no electricity and hot water and dwindling food supplies. We had to huddle together at the lobby of Mirador all those nights because no one wanted to walk the long storied corridors to our rooms without any electricity.
Many things have changed, of course, over the decades. There is a lot of traffic and a lot less trees, a lot more people and less charming little local businesses on Session. There are still many small pockets here and there though of that old Baguio—the public market, while larger, still has that charm. The forest trails in Camp John Hay are still mostly intact and the regional Department of Tourism has cleaned up one of the old trails and repackaged it as a Forest Bathing trail. Mario's and Cafe by the Ruins and Hill Station are still as reliable as can be but there are newer places that excite as well—Amare for their brick oven fired pizzas, Ozark for authentic food from the American south and the finest Japanese food in town from Chaya.
And this is how we spend our Christmas season now. Christmas decorations consist of two small tabletop Christmas trees made from recycled materials and a small Belen of painted terracotta figures crafted by my sister. We are huddled up in the mountains, disconnected from the city and from most of the people we know, unaffected by the rush of Christmas shoppers because we only give gifts to the bare minimum of people. We've unknowingly been practicing self-care and a “no-gifts-Christmas” during the holidays way before they even became popular. We eat well, celebrate quietly, and wish our loved ones well from up on our mountain. This is our Christmas.
Gabe Mercado is an improvisational theater actor and teacher. He runs the improv school Third World Improv (www.thirdworldimprov.com)