PHILIPPINES: Why not a Grandfather's Day or a Grandmother's Day?

MANILA, Philippines (Philippine Daily Inquirer), June 13, 2008: By Neal Cruz This coming Sunday is Father’s Day (Mother’s Day was a month earlier), and children will fete their fathers with lunch or dinner, or with gifts or with parties, or with cards (store-bought or done painstakingly by hand with ink and crayon). As a father myself (and also a grandfather), I treasure these family get-togethers and I will carry the memories (and the cards, especially those given by the grandchildren) to my old age. I carefully keep these cards as mementos and keepsakes, carefully gathering them in albums and looking at them one by one during the times when I feel particularly lonely and miss my children and grandchildren. Away from Father’s Day, however, aging and sensitive parents sometimes suffer from slights, mostly unintended, from their children. These slights are most of the time the result not of lack of love for the parents but of insensitivity or plain oversight on the part of the children. Still, they pain the parents very greatly although they may not show it. Old people are very lonely and sensitive...... By the way, there is a Father’s Day and a Mother’s Day, but is there a Grandfather’s Day or a Grandmother’s Day? Of course, grandfathers and grandmothers are also fathers and mothers, though much older, but wouldn’t it be nice if there is a separate day for each of them or even just one — Grandparents’ Day? If there already is, I haven’t heard of it—yet. At any rate, it is not as well publicized and exploited as Mother’s or Father’s Day. Malls have special sales on Father’s Day and on Mother’s Day and special suggestions for gifts for them; restaurants have special lunches and dinners; and newspapers and magazines have special stories and supplements for parents on these days. Why not for grandparents? Think of the additional business. And think of the happiness that we will all bring to the old folks—a special day of their very own, for them. We have to keep them happy always—or at least as often as possible. After all, they won’t be with us for very long. When they are gone, we will regret that we did not make their lives here happier the same way they tried very hard to make us happy when we were growing up. Don’t you wish there were more happy times to remember about them? When I was growing up in Malabon with my two younger brothers, our paternal grandfather, who was a widower, stayed with us. Our mother had just died and our father had remarried and lived with his new family in Manila. Our oldest brother had a family of his own, and our older sister and brother were away at school in Manila. There were just the three youngest children and their grandfather, already past 70, in that house in the middle of fishponds. We never knew a maternal grandfather and our paternal and maternal grandmothers (they died before we were born), but we had plenty of uncles and aunts, and granduncles and grandaunts. We even had a maternal step-grandfather, and many, many cousins. So one of my regrets was that I did not have at least two pairs of grandparents, “lolos” and “lolas” who spoiled us and whom we could run to when we hurt ourselves or were sad; or who cooked delicious “merienda” [snacks] for us. The sister of my mother did these for us; she was our surrogate mother. (She is still alive today at the age of 98.) It is because of them and my memories of them that I want a special Grandparents’ Day—to honor them and remember them with happiness. Copyright 2008 Philippine Daily Inquirer.