together to cook and enjoy a meal. This is a little tradition which
sporadically takes place every couple weeks and is usually very
spur-of-the-moment. This time we made banana-chocolate-chip pancakes and
yakisoba (delicious fried noodles). Quite the random combination, but it
sounded good at the time. :)
After Max went home, An Yang and I settled down in the living room. This
girl is an angel in my life. She is constantly encouraging, sweet, and
hillarious. She makes me laugh every day. :) So we took out some scissors,
some fancy paper I bought at the hiyakuen (100 yen) store, and made three
dimensional snowflakes while listening to Christmas music.
An Yang is from China, so she has never celebrated Christmas before. I
told her all about my family traditions last night, and promised to give
her the best Christmas experience I can this year. :) I might even buy her
pajamas to open on Christmas Eve. ;)
Knowing that I have good friends to spend the holidays with makes the pain
of being away from my family a little less. But only a little. The
Christmas music last night was making me tear up quite a bit, and I fell
asleep imagining the late night Christmas wrapping session with Mom, the
excitement of the little ones, and the jokes and laughter of the adults on
Christmas morning. Not to mention Mikey's breakfast, lunch and dinner at
grandma's, the chaos of everyone in one small room trying to open entirely
too many presents in an orderly manner, and passing out on the bean bag
chair with Tana or Peewee or someone in my lap watching cartoons. Now, of
course, I am getting all choked up thinking about it at work.
I remember making a conscious decision to stay here this Christmas, and I
remember thinking it was a good idea at the time, but now I can't remember
for the life of me why I made that decision. Was it finances or the
intention to tough it or character building or what? I know I have to
stick it out now, but Christmas is going to be extremely difficult for me
this year. Send me some love and some prayers, please?
I will send that at least! I know how hard it is (I'm not just saying that) to be away from family during the holidays. It's difficult, but that's when you rely on friends to buoy your sad spirits, and it sounds like you have made good friends in Japan!
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