As Soon As The Carolers Start Caroling

 

     A day before Christmas, I read that hundreds of thousands of Filipinos were afflicted with flu-like illness, with fever, cough, chills and body aches as symptoms. And as if on cue, the next day, Christmas day, like it was my gift from Santa for being naughty, I woke up with a severe cold and cough, and I remembered that few hours before that, I was awakened feeling chills all over my body.

     It’s been three days and I still feel sick (with coughs and cold and phlegm), though a little better. I haven’t suffered from fever or body aches, so I don’t know if I should be added to the statistic above (hundreds of thousand of Filipinos sick with flu-like illness).

     But this has been a yearly occurrence for me, I think, whenever the cold breeze start creeping into my room during the night, whenever our freezer welcomes some ham, whenever kids start singing Christmas carols outside our door, whenever my sister makes some fruit salad, whenever I have the urge of playing some Michael Buble Christmas songs on YouTube, I start to get sick.

    The cold worsens my allergic rhinitis and attacks my sinuses like Godzilla would attack a metropolis.

     It will last for days, and then, I will recover like nothing happened and I won’t get sick the whole year, except when the cold breeze starts greeting my skin and my nose again, and as soon as the carolers start caroling.

     Jinggam bells, jinggam bells! Jinggam all the way!