The Ordinary Time begins tomorrow and it would be good to have a ‘rerun’ before the Christmas Season end (although in the Philippines, Christmas is said to end of the Feast of Sto. Niño).

Oratory Christmas Parties
As always, for every Oratory we organize, we see to it that there would be a ‘Christmas Party’ for  the little children. We organized the usual children games, shower the little ones with candies and prizes. But what is more important, and above this material reality, is that the children understand well the true meaning of Christmas. We do this by letting them act the ‘Christmas Plays’ wherein little is the Blessed Virgin Mary and a newborn infant would be the newborn Messiah. Of course, the parents would get emotional as they see children dressed in biblical characters.

Christmas Day
Before the Solemnity of the Nativity of our Lord, our priests had the opportunity to celebrate for the local barangay of San Celestino the traditional Misa de Gallo. This culminated with the celebration of the Vigil Mass on December 24th held at the barangay chapel. Both members of IVE and SSVM joined the 150 faithful for this solemn celebration. The next day, we celebrated the Mass during the Day at the same chapel, and afterwards baptized three children.

Christmas Concert, Bagong Barrio
Our IVE parish in the Diocese of Caloocan organizes annually the ‘Christmas Concert’, participated by different parochial groups. And every year it gets bigger. These groups activiley participated in this beautiful activity, and it is all reflected with their preparations, costumes, some movements and singing. And joy is in the atmosphere! Those in formation participated in the said event, belting our own version of ‘Adeste Fideles’ in various languages-Latin, Spanish, English, Chinese and Russian.

The Octave of Christmas
During the octave of Christmas, we organized a series of celebration. Different group of nationalities cooked for different nights: Chinese, Filipino and International cuisines were prepared by the seminarians. We spent the night with some games. This ended with a simple celebration, while the rest of the barangay were busy lighting up their fire crackers – a new year has begun.