Merry Christmas!

Lee celebrated the day in the Japanese tradition, by working.  Yes, on a Saturday.  Due to the Emperor's Birthday and other holidays displacing school days, they had the KIT staff work a Monday class schedule on Saturday, after a normal Friday on Friday.  Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.  We thought we'd finally get a Christmas together...there's always next year, right?  And next year, Christmas is on Sunday, so they'll have to work even harder to louse it up again.

We promised at the end of the last post to show our Christmas setup, which is currently dominating the whole dining room table, so here it is:

Note: The small plastic fish is a gift (to Lee) from a male student who informed him that it is sea bream and that gifts of this particular fish give good luck.  This particular student has also tried to give Lee chocolate and yogurt.  We're not sure if he likes him or, you know, likes him.  (Lee: I only accepted the fish because he asked me twice with passable English and that level of language skill needs to be encouraged around here.  And, it was a less strange gift than the attempted yogurt, so, progress.)

We do wish we could be celebrating at home with family, but that will happen soon enough!  Now we're celebrating with some good food and some appropriately Christmas-themed movies like:

The Long Kiss Goodnight (Lee: I really liked the part where she fast-roped down the Christmas lights, breaking all the bulbs)

Die Hard

MST3K: Santa Claus Conquers the Martians

Love, Actually

We hope your Christmas was full of food, friends, and that all letters to Santa were answered!  Only one more Japanese Christmas for us...and stay tuned for our next blog post, which should hopefully involve vast quantities of monkeys.  You heard me - monkeys.