A Merry Carlo Rossi Christmas

A typical Christmas celebration today (at least in the Philippines) consists of nice little things such as Simbang Gabi, Noche Buena, various corporate parties and hours spent in shopping malls. Something similar can be said for our university, where efforts have been made to bring back the notion of a communal Christmas celebration: Christmas liturgies, Christmas parties, and—recently—the inauguration of a huge Christmas tree serving as the central point of our recent university-wide celebration.

But missing from our communal festivities was that opportunity for elevated, secular social intercourse provided by a good bottle of Carlo Rossi. Alcohol is banned in school, meaning that our Christmas celebrations were disappointingly sober. While in the West and most of the Christian world the grapevine is a staple of student life—ask any Oxbridge student—but here in the Philippines we seem to be allergic to the idea that adults can bring adult drinks into an adult institution and have adult conversations with older adults over a bottle of Montes.

We have forgotten a fundamental fact of social intercourse: getting buzzed is one of the closest things people can come to natural transcendence. Every ancient culture knew this. And because grace does not destroy nature but rather perfects it—as St. Thomas noted in his Summa (Ia q. 1 a. 1)—our liturgies today require bread and wine as elements to be transubstantiated into the physical presence of He who was born of a Virgin.

It is by means of the grapevine that we let go of ourselves—to a reasonable extent—into the common contemplation of transcendent things. Too much of the “good stuff” can make us like unto beasts or angels, it is true: but the right mix of beast and angel is the perfect expression of our rational animality. I’m not asking that we get wasted (for that would be a sin); but rather that we learn how to manage the ‘buzz’ in a way that can enable us to drift into one another and into the World of Forms. This task becomes so much easier when we learn how to drink properly.

Had it not been for the Leviathan’s teetotal tyranny, a UA&P Christmas would have been the perfect occasion for public, ritualized intoxication. Instead, we have to content ourselves with our private inuman sessions—or worse, spending the rest of the night in a club—where the possibility of us getting sinfully hammered increases as compared to a public banquet where the rules of civility and propriety remain in force.

But youth is nothing if not obstinate. The best we can do is replicate the opportunities robbed from us by stuffy bureaucrats in barongs by having our peers and professors over for some healthy conversations as facilitated by a bottle of Bouchard. Then we may speak of coming together as one university—students, teachers, admin assistants, management people, and union members. May our rifts be healed today through the advent of our Savior, to be kept at the forefront of our minds as we finish this pint of eggnog.