Christmas On Display at Tangub City (My Personal Experience)

December 1, 2008 - My day started with a lovely cool holiday. Today is a National Holiday in the remembrance of the Philippine hero, Andres Bonifacio. He died at November 31 but the government moved it to the nearest Monday, so today is holiday. The cool relaxing wind has awakened me from a deep sleep. I was then settled myself to eat, conscious of my surroundings. I walked to the living room and saw my cousin smiling. “Something’s up,” I murmured. As I seated on the couch, she immediately told me that we are going to witness the opening of the Christmas Symbols in Tangub City. “It’s worth a smile,” I thought.

It had been 2 years that we haven’t seen the huge arks full of Christmas lights, decors and other Christmas symbols. Though our hometown is Tangub City and sometimes we’ve spent the Holy Week and other family gatherings there, we still missed the event in Christmas. And today, we can’t afford to lose the fabulous moment anymore. Tangub City is a nearby city from Ozamiz City, where my aunts are settled in, just 20-30 minutes of travel.

I was having fun texting using my mobile phone, as I was currently registered to SMART’s two days unlimited text. I was texting my friends and I’ve noticed that their main priority is to go to Tangub City tonight to witness the opening too. They asked me if I am going too, almost all of my friends asked and excited about it, like it was more than a celebration that must not be missed. “This is going to be fun”, I said to myself.

After lunch is a whole bunch of preparation for me. I’ve got a lot of things to do in my mind; like what I am going to wear, because my dresses are not so many and I want to make myself appealing to others, specially to my friends because they’ve been seeing me always. I took a bath after collecting my thoughts back in my mind. I planned to be different today. I picked my cute checkered brown-and-white polo, yellow-green shirt with Chinese printing on it and a white short pants paired with a brown printed Banana Peel slippers. I put some local made gel on my hair and worried of the effect and covered my body with the odor I like. I’m quite amazed of myself, I didn’t expect that I can change my dress style to whatsoever they call this thing. I don’t mind of what other people would think so long as I changed to a nice more fashionate stuff.

The whole thing is for me to look good and better than I ever was. And so I was.

Before going to Tangub, I spent myself hanging at my girl’s house, waiting for the time to pass by because my cousin told me that we are going to Tangub at 7 pm tonight. It is exciting, another memory to store in my mind as well as to my blogs.

At 7:50 PM my aunt who has an orange multi-cab, fetched us. But before having a joy ride, we were looking for the missing house keys that have been missing for so many days now, and because of it, our house helper was forced to be left alone. I felt sorry for her but the blame was on me! I felt bad but the excitement drowned the bad feeling away.

I was very surprised while we were on the way because there were many people in the waiting area, urgely waiting for Commuter, a car for hire to transport passengers from Ozamiz to Tangub, and was desperate to ride first. It was funny because even if the car didn’t park yet, people hopped in to get a seat first. Too many people, which I even thought the Catholic Church in front of the waiting area was having a mass, but there was no mass at all. The Commuter car was then over loaded of passengers. The once dark road was filled with headlights, roaring engines of the cars and motorbikes and motorcycles. The people from Ozamiz were like evacuating to Tangub. A funny thing that I have every thought of.

We arrived at Tangub City Park around 8:30 and we were looking for a space to park the car and the motorbike of my cousin, a year older than me. Because we parked on the bridge higher than the park, I saw sooooo many people around. I couldn’t believe that I could see a crowd so large….so many people wanted to witness the event. And with it I could say that the event was, the Grand Opening of the Christmas Symbol.

I couldn’t even indulge the beauty of the arks around because it was diminished by different kinds of people from different kinds of places. I was almost chocking. I was with my two girl cousins, Justine and Pretty, who were looking for their long acquainted friend, Nikki, but never found her. We settled ourselves standing in front of the City gym and I found my friends from Tingog, a campus press organization that I was in at La Salle University-Ozamiz. I missed them a lot and I found out that they were here since noon to gather facts to feature this event and be printed in the December issue of their magazine. I’m excited to ask for a copy, and I wished to contribute something in the December issue too. =(

Around 9:30 in the evening, while I was loitering around, the mayor of the city, Jennifer W. Tan, announced a countdown to formally open the Christmas Symbol…from ten to one…….the sky then turned colorful with the magical sparks of the fireworks..... I thought it was the simplest form of fireworks, like I always saw in the horizon of Ozamiz, at first it was, but the longer they spark in the sky, the nicest colors comes out!! A 10 minute firework show made me say, SPLENDID! Not because it’s long, but it’s the nicest thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life, as I was expecting it would.

People from nearby places and cities are already making Tangub City as a part of their annual celebration to Christmas, a nice spot to unwind and feel the spirit of the season. I always want to make articles about how nice this place is, for our campus paper at LSU, but now that I am not there anymore, I’m still glad because my fellow journalist will feature the City by its beauty.