New Year celebrations

It's another new year!

New Year's eve was spent practically at the church were I once again had to provide accompaniment at the keyboard during the "midnight" mass at 8pm. As usual I had to be at the church at least ecrackers has finally convinced more people to resort to safer ways to make noise to greet the new year. In fact, I didn't hear too many firecrackers going off during the previous weeks and this morning has itself remained unusually quiet up to this late hour--which could also be due to people remaining in bed after staying up late.

In any case, I don't think one needs to raise hell to celebrate the coming of a New Year. The tradition of setting off firecrackers after all has its origins in Chinese culture where noise is made to scare off the bad spirits. While many Filipinos believe in all those bad spirits and feng shui, I myself don't believe in such superstitious stuff. (Hey, I'm after all a Christian, a Roman Catholic, so why should I?) Besides, I generally can't stand loud noise or music. (It makes me wonder how our neighbor's son can stand sitting in that pick-up of his with all that music pounding into his ear drums.)

We here at home haven't touched a single firecracker for long time. The last time we had a firecracker was something like twenty years ago when my father bought one of those cone thingies that, when lit, gives off a fountain of sparks for one or two minutes--which wasn't even a real firecracker if you think about it. Before that, we had sparklers for one or two years when my sister and I were still in grade school. Nowadays, I feel we're simply too old for such things. There are other anyway lots of other things one can do to celebrate and not get hurt at the same time. Like eating! He-he.