SANTA'S REINDEER FOR NOCHE BUENA

But it was not venison and there 's not one single red nose. 

In fact, the burnt flesh have the markings of a farmed salmon and wild catch tuna, the sizzling beef and lamb smelled of grass, and it was the stewed lima beans not the salad greens and buttered veggies that triggered hyperuricemia in the  Rastafari's rendition of a Biblical Psalm to serenade a holiday in Bakal 2 with a videoke night of Christmas carols.

With the patronage of St. Rose of Lima, pinot noir was poured from the shelves of Sol & Robert Price into 6-pack Indian pale ales, lagers, and wheat beers that stunned the Thursday Group who were enchanted enough to chill leftover tiim na pata, treat the dogs with a Christmas Eve dinner of tubbed kalderetang baka in a pot of sinampalukang manok and a platter of tokwa't baboy, and threw flakes of inihaw na bangus into a pinakbet casserole.

The offer was accepted, not from NGO Recruitment though, with the caveat that the Lao Big Event should have a chapeau in the joint statement of the 5th AMMW meeting in Nay Pyi Taw despite D's felicitations for missing Monday's Christmas party in Bantug but not Thursday's funeral and a request from Jakarta for additional data.

Thus was how the Phantom Biker rode for P6,000 worth of pork ribs disguised as Christmas trash with trimmings of cat and dog poop, and a fervent wish to win any of the lotto jackpot prizes so evenings of menudo, lechong paksiw, tinapang bangus, patatim, and cold Red Horse beer will last forever and ever. 

 The wine and the cake is Puregold Price Club.

The 12 pieces of round fruit is Supermall.

But the ginataang karpa is for an 84th birthday in Dizol to honor the children with small heads, a twitching chako master from Pantabangan, and the ageing saxophonist of Barrio Militar... 

THE RICE BASKET

The rice baskets were invisible on that particular day, sheathed in cheap Christmas wraps to be traded as gifts.

Large baskets for a tub of pinispisan na kambing and a drum of inihaw na bangus, medium sized for a pot of sinigang na hipon, and small ones for a case of  light beer and a flask of Irish whiskey, refreshments shared with friends as antidotes for a scuttled  meeting in Bangkok that exposed the fickleness of the RoP and rudderless boats lost in cash strapped currents that should be enough reason for tansformative partnerships to step in as the EU trends and cuts for Asia loom.  

Strava worked once but went kaput thrice despite a precautionary safeguarding broadcast of a late night JET narrative to a community of practice about a case and and a scoping, synonyms of weekly and fortnigtly meetings that were convened to ritualize a change prospectus, accept edits to an influencing strategy, and address the remaining vestiges of Kuningan.

There was an extension before the interview on how Malayantoc's crisp currency teleported a case of red wine to Lupao.

Christ's blood drawn thrice not from green bottles but tubed as glycated hemoglobin, fuel for an azure beam of light that burned glaucomic eyes with the aroma of toasted leftover lechon and kaldereta in Bakal 2, gaudy as the Munoz holiday lights but fatal like fried siomai, cheese sticks, flavored french fries, dull nachos, reheated barbecues, and pretentious shawarma.

Thousand bills were disbursed from city hall on Sunday but one is not enough for a rice basket of a month's medication that a lotto win can have by the truckload, ample like a butcher's mammary glands, flavorful like a chauffeur's nilagang baka, haunting like a headmaster's carnal soft lips...   

KUNINGAN, OUR 27th YEAR, AND CHRISTMAS IN LUMANG BAYAN

Kuningan is a soft rain accompaniment of the Merokok Man's ballad about how a Lucky Cat licked foams of Bintang and Prost from the food stalls at Plaza Festival where residents of the Menteng Pulo Public Cemery confer with financial managers while rifling through the 8th ASEAN Energy Outlook for 6 shots of  Teacher's Highland Cream and a power map as the ladies in Luang Prabang  disrupted an MCP review learning trajectory with a computer handover that is the public narrative of two Padang dinners, a dessert of sate kambing, and an Indonesian carnivore set. 

Sleep is a teen-faced Eurasian (most probably Spanish with Filipino ethnicity) whose ancient wrinkled hands slithered from JS Luwansa's Room 910 to race with a Bluebird to CGK, a red eye flight to Manila, and a morning bus trip to Tuguegarao.

27 is "100 years of Solitude", not in Macondo but in Bakal 2 where the Ciencias not the Buendias scrambled to rescue a failing structural engineer through Oplan GSIS by deploying a barrage of emails from the turrets of a team collaboration app that fired 100 sandwiches and juice packs to appease 100 recruited liberal conservatives, not from Macondo but those gathered in Hogwarts where happy hocruxes were relived 27 years after Fr. Apolo not Fr. Nicanor served potent undiluted mompo, to Baby Liza not Ursula, 27 years before the nights of patatim and inihaw na bangus in Bakal 2. 

There  might have been incidents with a horny capidua but not with Pilar and Amarantha, and there will be "tapon ebak" rides but not being restrained under a chestnut tree.

Lumang Bayan is almost Macondo and pogaca can pass as Pancit Cabagan, not the steamed rice for the adobo and pinakbet-flavored ice cream that were manually cranked in Bakal 2, hollowed concrete blocks of waknatoy for the Christmas lunch, snack, and dinner of aging once upon a time dreamers of Hogwarts whose ultimate thrill is concocting kalderetang kambing from a magically real potion of soju, pinot noir, and merlot.

It's almost like the chikin melting with the sun as gifts were traded for bluetoothed music that ignited the holiday lights in Munoz and stories of love found and lost...