How A Teacher Saved My Christmas

My family is traveling to Cagayan de Oro to spend Christmas day with my mom’s sister, whom she hasn’t seen since 2001. It’s an 18-hour bumpy bus ride, but I wish I were on that trip with them. Christmas can do that to you.

Seeing all those Facebook statuses about friends who are home for the holidays only add to the sadness. 

It wasn’t too bad last year, I don’t know why. Maybe because I was in a much better position in life. And maybe because it just felt exciting to spend Christmas in a new country and all. 

Or so I thought.

This is only my third time to spend Christmas away from home. 

Oh I remember that first time. 

The year was 2004, my first year in Makati. I had only been working for 5 months then and with my paltry salary as an auditor, I did not have enough of a bonus or savings to afford the plane fares that skyrocket during this most wonderful time of the year. 

I wasn’t alone in my predicament, though. Some of my flatmates were in the same boat, and when our college teacher Fr. DJ, a Jesuit priest who was in Manila at that time, found out about our situation, he insisted that we would spend Christmas with his own family, leaving us no room for argument.

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised at what Fr. DJ did. He was very generous like that, even when we were still his students in college.

It wasn’t obvious at first, though. He was one of the two “terror Jesuits” who taught us during our last year in college.

His subject was Philosophy, and he was the best Philosophy teacher I’ve ever had. He was rather eccentric – he was known to yell and throw his watch into the air and slam chairs down to make his point while he taught, but these very actions made it so hard not to keep your attention on him and absorb the lecture.

You could tell that he was very passionate about the subject and he was not easy to please. He made students work hard to earn their grades and made a few people cry during his oral quizzes.

But we loved him for that. And the fact that he genuinely cared.

When he was no longer our teacher, he was still there for us, constantly treating us to his favorite lasagna at Chinito’s.

On the day that an Accounting teacher announced that most of us might flunk her subject and not be able to graduate on time, the day that I saw two grown men break down and cry, one of them on the floor, at that, he took in the situation and offered the best comfort that anyone could ever have given that day.

He dragged a lot of mats from the Jesuit residence and laid them out on the backfield (our school’s soccer field), and we all lay down, including him, and gazed at the twinkling stars on the night sky.

We all graduated on time, by the way, and when I was already in Manila reviewing for the board exam, one of my younger friends who was under him then texted me, saying, “Fr. DJ just mentioned during our class that you are one of his best students.”

While a lot of my teachers since childhood have remembered me, his remembrance and recognition gave me the most happiness.

He went to Manila while we were reviewing and visited us in our dorms then brought us to the Ayala malls in Makati.

The next year, when we started working in Makati and found out that he was there too, we decided to contact him.

We first met up in Glorietta and when he found out we were planning to rent an apartment and move in together, he agreed to give it a house blessing.

When he arrived and saw the place, he was so overcome with joy and kept saying, over and over, that he was so proud of us.

Then he volunteered to give us money to buy food so that we could celebrate the Ateneo Fiesta in our home. He came over, and we ate palabok and all sorts of food, including his favorite blueberry cheesecake from Red Ribbon.

That was the year he invited us to spend Christmas with his family.

He fetched us at our apartment on Christmas morning and treated us to a hearty lunch at the Pizza Hut near our place. Pizza Hut was too expensive for us then, so imagine our delight when this happened. He ordered way too much and we couldn’t finish everything even though we were with Miss Tagatilok (the one who finishes all the food), Gay.

After that he brought us to his relative’s house mansion in Parañaque, where their clan was having a reunion.

We were all a bit shocked to find ourselves in a place with such expansive grounds and a bathroom so big and tastefully decorated, it looked better than our bedroom. Who knew that Fr. DJ came from such a rich family?

They were very nice, too, asking us to eat, which we regretfully had to decline because we were still bursting from all the pizza and pasta we had eaten. We wondered why Fadz had fed us when we were going to a place with lots of food.

So we decided to take a walk outside to burn off our meal and also to see all the other lovely houses in the neighborhood.

Then I caught my auditing firm’s own partner jogging in the vicinity. It only hit me then what an affluent subdivision this was indeed, if a KPMG partner lived there.

When we got back, it was time for mass, to be officiated by our very own priest. Fadz asked if we could participate by doing the readings, acting as sacristan, and stuff, which we agreed to.

I was assigned to do the first reading, and before turning the floor over to me, he introduced us his students, describing us with the word “brilliant”(which we don’t deserve) and explaining that we couldn’t spend Christmas with our families and he was happy that they had agreed to take these orphans in.

He looked like he was about to cry (he’s like that) while we were blushing furiously from all the attention.

After mass, we finally had some of the food.

Then one of the relatives gave away a bunch of pink stuffed heads with Christmas hats to everyone present, including us.

That’s how I ended up with Pinky, my favorite Christmas companion.

She represents Christmas in its truest sense – a teacher who went out of his way to ensure that a bunch of kids wouldn’t feel orphaned on Christmas day.

I am so sorry that I accidentally left her in our old flat’s storage cabinet this year.

Fr. DJ’s kindness for the holidays did not end there. Soon after, perhaps as a new year treat, I forget, he offered to treat us to Tokyo Tokyo, a chinese restaurant which was beyond our means at that time.

This was the moment we had all been waiting for, that we had prepared for by practicing how to use chopsticks so that we wouldn’t embarrass ourselves in front of our favorite teacher. Unfortunately I couldn’t go because I was in the worst part of an eight-day migraine.

They went without me, and when they came back, they bore gifts from him to me – lots and lots of fruits, to help me get better. The tears in my eyes that I got then were not from the pain.

I don’t know where he is now and if he still remembers me. But wherever he may be, I just wish he’ll have the happiest Christmas ever, because he truly deserves it.

I couldn’t say the same for me, but I’ll try.