pre-christmas

Christmas is on its way, although you'd never guess it here in Taneichi. No holiday decorations, christmas lights or special festivities. No snow (oh, tear... ;) and no holiday movies on TV, but plenty of Christmas music playing on the radio to remind me what I'm missing back home. I have to snicker while at the grocery store and Frank Sinatra's "I'll Be Home for Christmas" comes blaring through the loudspeaker....maybe they keep an English CD on hand and upon seeing me, quick pop it in for my amusement? Small joys...

And to spread a little Christmas joy, I'm throwing a Christmas party for four of my best girlfriends on Sunday nite. I have been super busy preparing for it, trying to make it a memorable Xmas for my friends (and me!). I've made gift bags/presents, cued some xmas movies to showcase our cultural traditions, planned an enormous feast, organized xmas music to get people in the holiday spirit and ..........and lastly, xmas wouldn't be complete with out decorating CHRISTMAS COOKIES!

I still can't read Kanji AND have never been able to bake, so in came Mayumi to the rescue! She helped me navigate the baking aisle and let me borrow her kitchen and oven for the nite. We had so much fun guessing on the conversions (grams, Celsious, liters etc...) so I feel pretty confident that I can whip up an alibi should things not taste delicious!

We opted for plain sugar cookies, rather than the tedious Christmas cut-outs. I know it's not the same thing, but in the effort of time........The sugar cookies turned out a little bigger than I had hoped...like what was suppose to make 30 xmas cutout cookies, yielded 10 cookies! OOPS! A blessing of a mistake though-- we will have more opportunities to fine tune our cookie decorating skills.

The frosting dilemma was solved after perusing several grocery stores. Powdered sugar is a rarity here, but we found it for about $2 a CUP!!!....so 5 bags later, and a small bag of cooking ingredients that cost more than an ENTIRE weeks worth of groceries for me. The frosting turned out especially delicious....so weird to taste something so sweet. I'm pretty confident my friends will NOT like this sweet excess. No sympathy on my part, if I can choke down raw sea urchin testacles, I'm pretty sure they can handle a cookie..

Stay tuned for pics from the party! I'm so excited to "celebrate" something cultural...finally! People who really want to learn about our culture! Hoorray!

Happy Holidays from Japan!