Mele Kalikamaka from my Ohana to yours

It is Christmas in the Pacific paradise. Don Ho is still very much alive, oh oh oh; Don Tiki is exotic, XO XO XO. Yes, Santa is still bedecked in white and red, and the reindeers do fly over the tropics.

Firs and evergreens grace many hotel lobbies, which delight the resident and visiting Slavs, Saxons, and Anglos. The Celts of varying mystic and foot tapping persuasions are not wanting of mistletoes and bitters. The Asiatic majority and Pacific islanders just go along, aping the northern hemisphere practices with every home displaying a lighted Tannembaum made of plastic and wire, recycled annually in season.

The season’s trinkets and the gift giving also provide the commercial fuel that fires the engine of the local economy, which is otherwise buffeted by the requirements of the U.S. military and the political whims of the federal government. It is also subservient to the fluctuations of the little tiger economies of the Far East whose noveau riche finds occasion to flash their wealth along the corridors of the abounding Duty Free Shops. The same bejeweled transients get themselves and offsprings to display flesh and figure along Waikiki Beach, permanently encrypting images in Nippon’s new line of captivating digitized media.

Mele Kalikamaka’s rationale in the Pacific is superficially religious though the Christianized Filipinos flock to midnight Mass that dribbles into early morning family gatherings and reunions. Pacific Islanders turn euphoric with the Protestant hymns rendered in their sing-song chants which postludes also into family revelries.

Carolers do make the evening rounds but most do so with a Church or organizational fundraising intent behind the melodious renditions.

Catatonic in appearance, the highbrow Japanese and Korean Christians do make a decent reproduction of Bach and Handel, Beethoven and Mendelssohn, in sanctuaries and concert halls. Their more charismatic counterparts, branding a new fervor from Pentecostal emotionalism, display their conversion with gusto and drums. In many homes are Christmas trees that stand next to fruited, scented, and incensed ancestral nooks. Santa’s jolly tu zi ta (rotund midsection) often competes with equally shaped laughing Buddhas of the Middle Kingdom, the land of the morning calm and the region of the rising sun!

Unchallenged as the supreme rationale for this holiday season is the celebration of the Ohana, ho ho ho! Since my wife and I are off-island guests, lacking recent memory of the very claustrophobic closeness of kinship proximity, we are somewhat happily oblivious to the complex and often strenuous web of mutual obligations and familial demands. We are innocent participant observers in an annual ritual of patriarchal and matrilineal lineage reaffirmation to the fourth degree of consanguinity!

We had come to Hawaii on an ungranted compassion leave. We were politely told by representatives of both my wife’s and my employer that compassion leave applies to those whose relatives already died, and not on those who are still dying. There is nothing mean or uncaring about this judgment. That’s just the way the regs are written. Being used to celebrating the living rather than the dead, and compassion being more an appropriate mode when one is alive than when in demise, the qualification did give us pause. But not for very long. The richness of Ohana makes exciting surprises for the awake, alert, and anticipatory.

The passing-away-ness of life, intellectually dismissed as common happenstance, and often blithely ignored, still came as a shock, even to one who perceives himself to be at peace with the awesome and mysterious nature of existence. My Dad in his 94th year had a recent renal failure, which brought him to all day professional care in an elder’s home. Aware enough to resent the fact that he has been confined to the ministration of strangers, it is also evident that the physical decline has exacted a heavy toll on his memory and the ability to recall. My Dad gives me the pained look of non-recognition, and when he was specifically asked if he knew who I was, he smiled and said, “Of course!” He then proceeded to mention the name of one of my cousins. Since this response played the same way when my two brothers showed up, I did not feel too badly for having been relegated to oblivion.

Death comes in many guises. A nephew who I had always thought was a paragon of virtue and a paradigm of proper behavior had his fingers caught in his office’s cookie jar. He was part of a pattern of deception and corruption that penetrated his public agency’s service procedures, and along with others, he was called to account. Though obviously peripheral in the whole operation, he still was meted 90 days in the penitentiary, $23K on recompense, and a widespread loss of face to an audience that previously held him in high regard.

Advent of senility stalks my 85-year-old mother who now lives by her lonesome in a community of elders since Dad’s confinement in the convalescent home. Suspecting the onset of Alzheimer’s, my nurse sister has put my mother on close watch, and put financial obligations on automatic bank account deductions. As to housekeeping, her apartment resembles an unattended mini-Costco warehouse about to be condemned by both the health and fire departments. Nevertheless, the family matriarch guards her constitutional right to property and privacy close to her chest, and no amount of cajoling and coercion has moved the geriatric stubbornness to some semblance of reasonableness and order, a predictable elderly response. Death does come even before the cessation of breath.

Life nevertheless graciously abounds more. My second daughter just gave birth to an 8.3-lb. boy. Immediately cared for by Chicago techie maternal aunt and Midwest-originating, southern-belle maternal grandma, he claims a convoluted if not confused biological and cultural pedigree. That’s just an inventory of one side. Predominantly Irish, though patently mongrel (Irish, Scot, German, Malay, and Chinese), Dillon Robert joins an Ohana that is culturally global and diverse. The same week of his birth, Dillon’s maternal grandpa is reunited with his long-separated Canadian daughter.

Dillon awaits as well a meeting with step grandma who is a young Chinese nurse on her first foray into the western world. Two weeks before, an aunt married in Melbourne, and will start a new life in the legal profession in the Land Down Under. We haven’t mentioned the Emerald Isle tradition that Dillon has become an heir to. No longer is it enough for a village to raise a child; the globe itself must now provide the nurturing venue.

Ohana. La Familia. The celebration of communal existence! That is what this season is all about in Hawaii, Saipan and elsewhere. Mele Kalikamaka!

(Strictly a personal view. Vergara writes a weekly column for the Saipan Tribune.)