Kurisumasu Omedetou! Merry Christmas! Part 1 - Christmas Eve

Christmas may be a big holiday here in Japan, but it's not one of those fabulous ones like Respect for the Aged Day, which you get off. Unfortunately, as fond as they are of Santa and Christmas trees and giving gifts, I still have to work on Christmas day. However, thanks to the Emperor's birthday (December 23) falling on a Sunday this year, we did get Christmas Eve as a "substitute" holiday.

One of the ALTs in Takayama, a fantastic Irish lass named Fiona, hosted a party at her place this afternoon. My contribution: sugar cookies ^_^ I'm becoming well-known for baked goods, it seems.

My favorite part of the sugar-cookie-process is the making part. Eating them is enjoyable of course, but there's just nothing quite like putting together a bunch of seemingly unrelated ingredients and coming out with something that's soft and tasty and looks like home.

Since the party was this afternoon, we made them this morning. Meanwhile, Theresa was busy making mashed potatoes on my stove, ha ha

As everyone knows, you can't have good sugar cookies without an unhealthy amount of butter... which I softened in my microwave prior to mixing in as I have to do EVERYTHING by hand here.

And I mean everything. I really should invest in a mixer I think..

I put Dave in charge of "shape-engineering"


He did a pretty good job ^_^

And I baked them in my little toaster oven. It worked pretty well!

In fact, it worked so well that I was swatting Theresa and Dave away from the cookies so we would have enough to bring to the party, ha ha

The party was pretty awesome. We had a big crowd and lots of tasty dishes. Whole chicken, homemade stuffing, mashed potatoes, carrots, various other things...

and the dish that got the biggest oohs and ahhs from the Americans and Canadians

mac and cheese! KRAFT mac and cheese! sent from one lucky ALTs wonderful wonderful mother in Canada (^-^)v
Santa made an appearance

we won some hats..

Dave tried a Hot Toddy

And our favorite Brit, George, provided the Christmas pudding. Which tasted suspiciously like fruitcake, only less dry. And more British.


After all the afternoon festivities, our partying wasn't quite over yet as we had been invited to dinner by one of my Japanese friends. Patty, you should be proud, even half way around the world I ended up in church on Christmas Eve.

We sang songs, the kids played bells

We ate Christmas Cake

We played games and made balloon animals


And we even had a sermon. In Japanese, of course, but everybody knows the Christmas story so we weren't too lost. I think.
All in all, it was a fun party. A bit more wholesome maybe, than the one before it, but it was cool to be celebrating the other side of Christmas, in Japan, with Japanese friends ^_^