MINIATURES

Last night we were watching a pirated version of the latest "Spider-Man" movie, "No Way Home" (sorry can't wait). In the last part of the film, the spider hero was seen frolicking in the snow -- It was Christmastime. Suddenly. I asked myself how many unforgettable stories and movies were set during Christmas?-- Comes to mind foremost is the story of a rich, stingy, and oft complicated Ebenezer Scrooge in Dicken's classic, "A Christmas Carol". There is also ETA Hoffman's "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, to which Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky set his famous ballet -- "The Nutcracker Suite". Back in high school, we read O. Henry stories, and "The Gift of the Magi" is always a favorite. There are movies and stories we often would like to associate with this great time of the year. Jose Rizal has the last chapters of the Noli set in Christmastime, but what Rizal did was to make it quasi tragic, somewhat melancholic with Basili

  Our lotto aficionado of 1892 bought a kind of lotto ticket similar to this -- the Spanish lottery in the Philippines. He won second prize. I just superimposed the real winning number combination 9736. Perhaps this was how it looks like. And yet I still feel one number is missing. The winner was actually not a freeman that time. He was exiled to a coastal barrio in Dapitan, Mindanao guarded by colonial authorities. The ticket actually won P20,000 (Quite a lot during that time). It is said, that Jose Rizal had to share it with his jailer Captain Ricardo Canicero who happened to own half of the ticket. With the P6,000 price money, he bought some hectares of land, enough to allow him to live a life of quiet and prosperous isolation. I wonder what numerologists would have come up with if the rest of the story says, the winner ended up losing everything. What is this ancient lore of numbers that "mystic" like him has a way of manipulating it for their advantage? Pasig City Decemb