Christmas in Japan

Merry Christmas everyone (well a day late at least)! Thought I would share with you a little bit about how the Japanese celebrate Christmas. First of all, yes, they do celebrate Christmas. It is the most secularized version of Christmas I have ever experienced. Mainly because most people here are Buddhist or Shintoist so the birth of a Christian figure is not really celebrated. It was all about Santa and the lights! I saw plenty of beautiful light displays during the month of December.

A giant tree and ornament in the Tokyo Dome area

A whole tunnel lined with snowflake lights

The decorations at my station :) I'll miss them when they are gone.

There were also decorations and sales all over the place at department stores. I was even able to get some great decorations from the one hundred yen store. I bought a small cute tree, some garland, a fake wearth of poinsettias and a window decoration.

My tree :D

One of the things that amused me greatly is that most of the cards are 3-D. They looked really cool!

A card from one of my students

On the actual day of Christmas, everything and everywhere was still open for business and most people seemed to just go about their days. Most people celebrate by giving their direct family (like mother, father, and siblings) a gift and then having a dinner from KFC finished off by some Christmas cake. That's right, Japanese people eat Kentucky Fried Chicken for Christmas. It's what they think that we do in the States. Apparently, KFC used to be one of the only places you could find fried chicken so all the foreigners would go there during the Christmas season just to get something familiar so other people soon started imitating them and a tradition was born. The KFC by my station has had a table outside of the store to pre-order your Christmas chicken for about a month now. No joke. Many other places have started to catch on and sell fried chicken for Christmas such as the convenience stores and other American chains like McDonalds. I personally had a chicken sandwich from McDonalds for lunch that had a special Christmas sauce since KFC was way to busy for my liking. A Christmas cake is pretty much a regular cake decorated for Christmas. It's a layer of cake then icing and strawberry filling and another layer of cake. I went on a mission to find one for myself. Lucky for me, my grocery store was selling it in small two piece containers so I grabbed one of those!

Hello Christmas cake! Oishii!

I had a pretty chill Christmas. On Christmas Eve, I made my way to Roppongi so I could go to midnight Mass at the Franciscan Mission. It wasn't actually at midnight since the trains stop running. So I made my way right after work and got there just in time to join the sing along 10 mins before 9 PM. Mass was over by 10:30 and I went home to sleep.

There's poinsettias in front of the altar: must be Christmas!!

Christmas morning, I woke up early to Skype with my family and watch as they opened my gifts. Then I got a nice surprise of being able to talk to my boyfriend for a good 2 and a half hours. From there, I grabbed my McDonalds and Christmas cake. Another nice surprise came my way a little bit later. One of my friends texted me and wanted to meet up. So we headed to Tokyo to eat, drink, and be merry on Christmas. We had a great time and my friend almost missed her last train home! Yikes! But everything worked out. I didn't get home until about 1 AM and knew I had to wake up again to Skype with my dad's side of the family so I quickly hit the sack. I got to Skype with them as well and watched them open their presents and they all sang to me <3

Singing!

It was a pretty good way to spend the holiday. I still missed my family and friends like crazy and even cried a little during Mass but I tried to make the best of it. At least, I got to have fried chicken and Christmas cake.