Giving and receiving, scarcity and abundance this Christmas

To put credit where it is due, I owe the Aquino administration one significant change in my family life this Christmas. By blindly inflicting the nightmarish traffic gridlock in our national capital, the government has killed the uncontrollable consumerism that used to possess my family whenever Christmas was at hand. Our brood of four absolutely do not want to venture out of the house to do any shopping these days, in order to avoid the traffic. We bear no responsibility for enabling the commercialization of this great feast of Christendom.

Thanks to the ingenuity and enterprise of mall developers like SM, Robinsons, Ayala and Gaisano, there’s one subject now that I’m afraid to research on for fear of what I might discover. This is the question whether there are now more big malls than hospitals and universities in this country.