Winter Break Pt. I – KFChristmas

Christmas and New Year are both celebrated in Japan, though a little differently than in America. I often explain to my students that they’re basically switched. In America, Christmas is for spending time with your family and NYE is for partying with your friends (or also your family when you’re old and/or have no friends). In Japan, this is reversed. Christmas is more of a couples’ holiday. For kids, it’s just a day where you get a present or two and get to eat cake (we’ll get to that in a minute). New Year’s Day, however, is when you get together with your family to eat traditional foods and make the first (and possibly only) visit of the year to a nearby temple. They also send New Year cards instead of Christmas cards (though you don’t send or receive any if you’ve had a death in the family that year).

Christmas season in Japan starts November 1st if you go by the stores. Jack-o-Lanterns are switched to Santas overnight. Japan has fully embraced the Santa and presents part of Christmas, but seeing as less than 2% are Christian (Christians didn’t make the best first impression a few hundred years ago), they largely ignore any religious aspects. This means that they try to force me to work on Christmas (though the kids are already on break, so I don’t have to go to school). Either way, I generally take that day off.

Instead they eat Christmas cake and KFC. Yup, that KFC. Back in the 70’s, KFC launched a “Kentucky for Christmas” marketing campaign telling people that eating chicken on Christmas was what all the westerners do (the inspiration is debated, but it comes down to foreigners not being able to find turkey here for the holidays and eating fried chicken). Now you have to pre-order your fried chicken and Christmas cakes a month or more in advance if you want any hope of getting one. They also all decorate their Colonel Sanders statues as Santa (pretty much every KFC has a Colonel statue).

We like to do a nice little mix of eastern and western Christmas. Which basically means we do American Christmas and then eat cake. 

I used to go home every Christmas, but a certain global event a few years ago combined with the fact that traveling that far with two toddlers is comparable to many forms of torture banned by the Geneva Convention means that we’re stuck here (it doesn’t help that our break is only about a week and someone decided to stop flying to Detroit from our nearest airport. F you, Delta). Instead, every year I send a cardboard facsimile that I’m sure has frightened a number of you (which I find very offensive).

This Year

Since Christmas is not treated as a proper holiday, Japanese people (e.g. Maki) still have to work. Not only that, but they’re usually extra busy since it’s right before their winter break. This creates a dilemma because time-wise she’d have to go to work in the middle of opening presents. There was also a magic show at school, so we did the unthinkable. (At this time, I encourage you to prepare your choice of visual gag for receiving bad news. Put on some pearls to grasp, drink a sip of water, move near a soft couch to faint on. Ready? Ok.) We sent them to school on Christmas.

I know. Blasphemous. So Christmas morning, the kids woke up to a few small presents from Santa, ate breakfast, then went to school. J had asked Santa for puzzles, stickers, and books (he asked me for the Pokemon and Marvel stuff). I think C would just list a food any time we asked her. It was more what she wanted at that moment. While everyone was gone, I played hide and seek trying to find all the places I’d hidden presents over the past few weeks. I may have found a lot of the stocking stuffers a little late for Santa’s visit, but they made their way into the stockings for round two. Then when they got home, the rest of the presents were waiting for them under the tree.

Btw, parents already know this, but deciding/buying presents is hard. You gotta think of things for everyone else to get them, and when you have multiple kids, you have to make sure it’s about even. But the older kid is now able to play with new/more advanced stuff, while the younger is growing into the toys that you already got for the older kid when they were that age. Also it’s hard to restrain myself now that J’s and my hobbies overlap. I buy presents the same way I buy meat for yakiniku/BBQ. “Ok, this should be enough. Oh, wait, didn’t see this. Ooh, that one’s on sale, gotta get that.”

They were equally appreciative of everything, though I suspect J enjoys the opening of presents more than the present itself in most cases. He breezed through opening them (though has since given them all the proper time). C was the opposite, wanting to take her time and properly check out her new toy or book before opening another. Then we had a delicious traditional meal of Christmas tree pizza and chicken (home-cooked chicken, not KFC). We did have Christmas cake, though. That’s a tradition worth adopting.

There were then two more days of work/school before the holiday started. These were actually the only days J went to school because he had caught some cold (as is tradition around this time). Luckily by Christmas he was good enough to go to school (he did unfortunately miss a visit from skinny Japanese Santa, though). Most schools went on break the week before, but daycares stay open until the parents go on break. From December 29th until around January 5th, the entire country goes on break, including all non-emergency doctors. So all you can do is pray and hope your kids don’t get the Bedrock bug during that time. Especially since we were planning on going to Legoland for 3 nights in the new year…