Fiesta or Pest - ah?

Fiesta! Celebrating the feast of a patron saint can be quite chaotic and totally nonsense. If you are actually living in a country like the Philippines, this fact can be proven beyond reasonable doubt. Celebrating the feast of a saint has been a tradition for hundreds of years of now ever since Spain made the Philippines a dumpsite of their ridiculous influence. I live in a place where it celebrates the feast of Our Lady of Fatima but I just realized that today is the 30^th of May. Our Lady of Fatima should be celebrated at the 13^th of May. I feel like I’m starting to get confused with dates now. 13 is 30? Or may be the whole country had been swept by Gloria Macapagal – Arroyo’s tactic to move and celebrate official holiday dates to a different day. Or has her influence already reached the gates of Vatican? Well, since I was a kid, I did not like the idea of celebrating Feasts. I don’t know why. It gave me the impression that people were being given license to ran sack someone’s home and leave it as soon as you get what you wanted. In this case, food was the thing that is very much sought after. Of course, who does not want free food? Funny thing is you go into somebody’s house that you really don’t know anything about. It’s true! A complete stranger can come in and eat without being invited. In the spirit of the tradition, let’s go ahead and do that! But I won’t! Moreover, people can sing their lungs out! Talking about being inconsiderate. Yes, even if they take them till the wee hours of the night. When everybody should be sleeping and yet they crank the volume of their abominable videoke machines just to let everybody hear their horrible and drunk sounding voices. Will the saints love this kind of behavior? Saints, I think should be honored in serenity, not in this barbaric kind of way. I am not a religious person but I respect martyrs who gave up their lives in service of the people and gave up their luxurious and mundane lives to live in accordance of what they believe in. I think Filipinos are really lost in the dark. This is not the way of how saints should be remembered. Totally posers!