Alady had tucked two images of the Holy Child Jesus as king into a stroller.
That was not what first captured my attention under one of the bleachers in the churchyard.
Rather, I was drawn to the girl in the arms of the lady, mother or some other relation, by the pram.
The girl must have been four or five years old, but she was dressed in the red and gold motif of a royal Christ. She must have carried one Santo Niño while the adult bore the other one during the procession on that wet and windy January dawn.
In the preceding December on a rainy afternoon, in a chitchat in the faculty room, a colleague and I contrasted the country’s January fiestas.
Up north, devotees hold a procession in honor of the suffering Jesus of Nazareth and jostle with each other to touch the sacred statue as they pulled it through Manila’s thoroughfares.
We noted that devotion does not require such investments of brawn down here in the south, where celebrating the infant Christ is more festive than penitential and is therefore more fit for children.
There is room for the fiesta Señor to grow, however. The girl in the Santo Niño suit was fortunate. She must have come from a well-to-do household, one that could afford a stroller for her.
Outside the church, as clouds darkened and rain began to fall, a street dweller, probably in her teens, went from one devotee to another to try to get some alms.
Minutes earlier, as a river of candlelight carried by the faithful flowed downtown, homeless children slept on the sky walks.
When will the Holy Child’s festival truly be for both those children whom their keepers can dress up like the blue-blooded and the ones who are paupers from a material standpoint?
The world can tyrannize kids. Social Welfare Secretary Judy Taguiwalo last year called on Filipinos to unite against the growing tide of child abuse across the land.
Parents, too, can be cruel to their offspring. On the fourth of January, the eleventh day of Christmas, the Philippine Daily Inquirer reported that workers found a two-week-old baby left in a sugarcane plantation.
At the opening Mass for Fiesta Señor, the priest stacked Filipino love for the Santo Niño against harsh conditions for children.
Those who truly love God will take care of children, especially the ones who suffer, he said. Will devotees be spurred to act?
Will the state listen? Allies of President Rodrigo Duterte plan to enact a law to lower the age of juvenile criminal liability from 15 to nine years old.
Fiesta Señor season is Cebu’s second Christmas, a friend of mine wrote. Christmas should not disenfranchise children from the good life. The birth of the Messiah hallowed children long before any movement for their rights. This, one can understand in returning over and over again to a homily that Pope Benedict XVI gave at Christmas midnight Mass in 2006.
“The child of Bethlehem directs our gaze towards all children who suffer and are abused in the world, the born and the unborn. Towards children who are placed as soldiers in a violent world; towards children who have to beg; towards children who suffer deprivation and hunger; towards children who are unloved,” Pope Benedict said.
“In all of these it is the Child of Bethlehem who is crying out to us; it is the God who has become small who appeals to us. Let us pray this night that the brightness of God’s love may enfold all these children. Let us ask God to help us do our part so that the dignity of children may be respected,” he added.
“May they all experience the light of love, which mankind needs so much more than the material necessities of life.”