As children, we realize quickly the falsehood of elf workshops, Rudolph, and Santa Claus. In our maturity, the next myth we debunk is that of a merry Christmas. Indeed, while Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” replays for the 13th time in a neighbor’s home, while guests biding time to bow out move on to their third helping of buko pandan, and while you and your cousins transcend differences in age and income bracket with a clarion call for a brighter new year, Congress signs a 2026 budget that all but foils this.
In pruning the Department of Public Works and Highways’ budget by 40% of its original proposal, yet entertaining its last-ditch plea—one of many from other branches—to bring back ₱54 billion, the bicameral conference committee signals that it is keen to get on with the season of change. But steep hikes in social protection, the same sort that typifies a historical fixation on relief over reform, lets one see through the ruse.
Behind what once were closed doors, programs have doubled in funding from their original allocation in the National Expenditure Program (NEP), as in Tupad (or Tulong Panghanapbuhay sa Ating Disadvantaged) and AICS (or Assistance to Individuals In Crisis Situations), which are now at ₱25 billion and ₱63.9 billion, respectively. Some newcomer programs were also introduced, like the semesterly Tulong Dunong, which had no prior share in the NEP because authority over such was transferred to the Commission on Higher Education (CHEd) only in the bicam.
On the matter of CHEd’s windfall, budget watcher Kenneth Isaiah Abante says Tulong Dunong must “have guidelines to ensure it doesn’t become controlled by politicians”—to ensure that down the line, it doesn’t metamorphose into “pork.”
How ill-timed it is that the feasting family, in these days of healing, must hear again the word that brings to mind lurid stills of rationing meals till the next tranche of aid, of scheduling the month around the next release of ayuda, of queueing, pleading, and performing gratitude.
Yet, this is a caution they’ll carry past the holidays, as the sleeping giant that is ₱243 billion in UAs (or unprogrammed appropriations), triple the ₱68.8 billion proposed by the Senate, can wreak the same havoc at any time, should any department require an extra handout.
(This trend whereby the bicam bloats standby funds to almost triple the executive proposal can be traced way back in the Duterte era when, in 2022, Congress funneled an additional ₱100 billion into UAs.Thus, the illusion of a bicam that learns from the past holds no water.)
This amount, salt on the wounds of ₱141 billion in rent-heavy infrastructure, ₱57.9 billion for pork at the local level, and an ₱8.1-billion budget for the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (triple its seed money in 2025) are all glaring holes in the bicameral report. Yet, its ratification was effectively railroaded—on the day of voting, lawmakers only had seven hours to review the 200-page document.
The numbers also provide a grating backdrop to the trade czar Cristina Roque’s exhortation to families late in November: to produce a Noche Buena meal with just ₱500.
And to City Hall’s general stinginess in this season of giving, given form by the stringent criteria for reception of the pamaskong handog; some who live in condominium units, are away from family, or, in the case of Quezon City, do not carry a QC ID, were reportedly barred from receiving such. Vulgar circuses when all the people want is bread.
On the other side of the fence, Cynthia Villar, matriarch of a clan said to have reaped much from flood control projects, shared on Facebook their Christmas dinner, supposedly quaint and buoyed by the “simple joy of being together.” The centerpiece is a roast turkey (one raw, frozen whole turkey would set one back by no less than ₱2,000.)
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From the comedor, almost two tables away, the stentorian voice of a relative blares. He Red-tagged me two Christmases ago for my membership in the campus paper. Bristling, he now complains to kin including my immediate family about the supposed radical undertones of my just-published report, and says I should write in a more measured register lest he force another talk with me.
Christmastime is not a buffer from violence in all its forms.
In fact it seems the security apparatus views it as open season. On Dec. 20, the Philippine National Police’s Criminal Investigation and Detection Group seized the peasant organizer Carmilo Tabada in Bohol on already-dismissed terrorism financing raps. On the same day, military elements interrogated the students of Bonbon National High School in Cebu as to their parents’ engagement in protest actions. The message is clear: The Christmas spirit does not stay the hand of those bent on extinguishing it.
In Negros, Warlita Jimenez, a peasant leader from Kabankalan City, was shot four times inside her home at 11 p.m. on Christmas Eve. Only in November 2024, her husband, Joseph Jimenez, was slain in the targeted assassination that also claimed the life of cultural worker Ericson Acosta.
“We haven’t even moved on and now another life in our family has been taken,” Jocel Anecito, daughter of the Jimenezes, told 99.7 Brigada Kabankalan.
When violence seeps through the craggy interstices of private life, the mind bears the brunt of it. I recall that last Sept. 21, while covering the Baha sa Luneta program on Mendiola, I ran frantically along the arcade, my throat and eyes burning like an open wound. Throngs of panicked protesters were banging on doors ordered locked by establishment owners, riffling through open-air refrigerators for water, and tripping over themselves on the asphalt, their helter-skelter flight broken by policemen bent on demonstrating the full might of the state.
Coming back to Mendiola on Nov. 30 for Baha sa Luneta 2.0, I kept watch anxiously for the projectile to be thrown from either the protesters’ camp or the police’s, which would precipitate an altercation. It never came. The rest of my watch rehashed the same paranoia.
Always anticipating, even from friends and family, the quip that would push me to improvisation, to respond with words and symbols derived from the language of fear. Always anticipating another holiday season spent merely surviving amid cheer and merriment.
Yet I know that the tears I let trickle in September, after debriefing with my team, were less the effect of the tear gas clinging to my clothes than a sublime feeling which, I feel, captivated many of us journos on that day—an indomitable urge to press on, to not let life passively burn its wick. “Nothing, in writing as in life, is wasted,” wrote the author and professor Glenn Diaz.
The members of Kilusang Bayan Kontra Kurakot spent Dec. 30 not in retrospection on the year that was but by laying flowers, accompanied by calls to end corruption, at the monument of Dr. Jose Rizal, ground zero of the Baha sa Luneta program months prior. The convener, David San Juan, called for unflagging fervor: “‘Yung corruption sa pork barrel, sa flood control, tuloy-tuloy. Kaya nandito tayo para tuloy-tuloy na kalampagin at singilin din ang gobyerno.”
Note the wording, particularly the use of tuloy-tuloy (continuing), the choice of words wrought doubtless by the slow burn of this dreary saga—the year is ending, and the powerful have yet to be put behind bars.
But San Juan provides a blueprint for militancy for 2026: simply to continue, in spite of it all. Even with the Christmas spirit sullied, the new year remains a pivotal site of contest between the people and the antagonisms that besiege them.
The challenge for us is to extinguish the cigarette, to shed this precious yet insular melancholy that kept us company last Christmas—our Santa Claus, perhaps. To pick up where we left off in 2025, and to become ourselves the makers of a happy new year. To give rejuvenated meaning to the salutation, and to make the new year happier than the last, always and without fail worth fighting for.
Josemari Luis C. Lagman is in his fourth year as a student of broadcast media arts and studies at the University of the Philippines Diliman.
Read more: On the cusp of 2026, where are we at in the corruption scandal?
