Have a Holly Jolly Christmas

Stopping by to say 

Spirit of Christmas

"The Spirit of Christmas 

is in its beautiful traditions 

and thoughtful customs"

Five days to go and its Christmas time. Whew, time flies so fast and I do miss a lot of things I used to do.

First is the "Simbang Gabi" or Misa de Gallo (nine days of dawn masses). The Misa de Gallo starts as early as 4am. It commences on 16^th of December and ends on a Midnight Mass on the 24^th of December. I always tried my best to complete these nine (9) masses because my mom would always tells us that if we complete the nine masses, our wishes will come true. I don’t really remember the wishes I had but as far as I am now, I am thankful and blessed for some of them came true. 

Second is right after the mass is the traditional delicacies await the churchgoers. Food stalls were right outside the church and two of my favorites are bibingka and puto bungbong.

 Third is the caroling. This is the singing of Christmas Carols from one house to another, which we were using our homemade musical instruments like tambourine made of bottle caps, drums made our of cans.

Merry Christmas to all.

Tabidatsu Kimi E - My Brother's First Collaboration Project

Guest Post: Yume no Kitsune

http://napnayra.blogspot.com/2012/12/tabidatsu-kimi-e-my-first-collaboration.html

I got so excited when a very talented singer actually considered to record a collaboration cover with me via YouTube, since I'm only new to this business of covering songs, and admittedly not the talented one. Yes, I do have some recorded covers in my YouTube channel, but those are all demo covers. My intention was for real singers to actually remake them.

So when this girl, TheShinminhyun , invited me to sing a duet with her, I was very hesitant because she's really good (and promise, this is not an overstatement), and I don't feel talented enough to sing with her; When I listened to her cover of Utada Hikaru's First Love, I was so impressed because she sang it with such emotion that I was at point of tears. This was the start of our collaboration [and hopefully, she would also consider me as one of her friends : )].

The song we worked on is RSP's Tabidatsu Kimi E, which was very memorable to me because I was in the hospital due to a minor surgery when I first heard it - that was on 02Dec2011. From then on, I fell in love with the song and even planned to make a sing-along English version but wasn't able to come up with one yet. 

But now, about a year later, I got to sing this song and this time, with a very talented girl from Indonesia. Her real name is Shintia, and she went through a lot of troubles while working on this project, so it took a while before she was finally able to finish producing the track.

Finally, on 09Dec2012, she messaged me with the link of our collab in MP3 format, and I was in awe when I heard her voice because she sounded almost like the real singer (even my niece, Molly Mae, said the same upon hearing her voice). Immediately, I worked on producing the first version of the video, because the official one will show us singing the song. The video quality here is a little off when I converted the format to WMV, but I'll see to it that our official video will be way much better (I'll do my best to produce an HD video of us).

For the meantime, here's my first collab project. "Hope you all like it.

Pass the WORD: Plant Today and Wait for Many Tomorrows

 “ If you plant today, it doesn’t mean you’ll harvest tomorrow. You’ll have to wait for many tomorrows  before you harvest” – Bo Sanchez

        There are times that after all the hardworking we did; we would still end up to disappointment. We were neither getting any credit at all nor any reward back. Then anytime we would surpass a trial, another will come right after and this time a heavier challenge. We are somehow like Pacman who needs to face a rematch every time we won. It seems that we need to prove that we are really the strongest one in this battle.

 Yet God has His own way of communicating to His people. God is good and he listens when we prayed. When He answered, He uses somebody to speak for Him.

 Bo Sanchez Practical Soulfood for Successful People’s article for today entitled How The Law of Farm Can Change your Life shares the real virtue of waiting, being patient and expecting that God’s reward will come in ways that will surprise us.

It may be true that most of the people around us may fail to acknowledge what we did for them. We may not be given credit nor we may not get what we expect things to happen right away. There may be thousands of reasons to lose hope but the good news is there are billions of reasons not to give up as well. So, just keep on doing what we have to do today. Keep on moving forward. Never focus on how rough life would be or painful. Just keep on planting and reap the best in God’s special time. Believe with God all things are possible. May our dreams come true.

 If you want more inspirational blogs from Bo Sanchez feel free to visit http://bosanchez.ph/