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<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nInstead they eat Christmas cake and KFC. Yup, that KFC. Back in the 70\u2019s, KFC launched a \u201cKentucky for Christmas\u201d 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.\u00a0They also all decorate their Colonel Sanders statues as Santa (pretty much every KFC has a Colonel statue).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We like to do a nice little mix of eastern and western Christmas. Which basically means we do American Christmas and then eat cake. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019re stuck here (it doesn\u2019t help that our break is only about a week and someone<\/em> decided to stop flying to Detroit from our nearest airport. F you, Delta). Instead, every year I send a cardboard facsimile that I\u2019m sure has frightened a number of you (which I find very<\/em> offensive).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Since Christmas is not treated as a proper holiday, Japanese people (e.g. Maki) still have to work. Not only that, but they\u2019re usually extra busy since it\u2019s right before their winter break. This creates a dilemma because time-wise she\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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. <\/p>\n\n\n 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\u2019s 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\u2019s hard to restrain myself now that J\u2019s and my hobbies overlap. I buy presents the same way I buy meat for yakiniku\/BBQ. \u201cOk, this should be enough. Oh, wait, didn\u2019t see this. Ooh, that one\u2019s on sale, gotta get that.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n 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\u2019t get the Bedrock bug during that time. Especially since we were planning on going to Legoland for 3 nights in the new year…<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Christmas and New Year are both celebrated in Japan, though a little differently than in America. I often explain to my students that they\u2019re basically switched. In America, Christmas is …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":742,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[24],"tags":[23,22],"class_list":["post-739","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-a-new-era","tag-a-new-era","tag-dad-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tgc.kaatissensei.pizza\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/colonel-santa.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tgc.kaatissensei.pizza\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/739","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tgc.kaatissensei.pizza\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tgc.kaatissensei.pizza\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tgc.kaatissensei.pizza\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tgc.kaatissensei.pizza\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=739"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/tgc.kaatissensei.pizza\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/739\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":750,"href":"https:\/\/tgc.kaatissensei.pizza\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/739\/revisions\/750"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tgc.kaatissensei.pizza\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tgc.kaatissensei.pizza\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tgc.kaatissensei.pizza\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tgc.kaatissensei.pizza\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}This Year<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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