クリスマス

I had a White Elephant gift exchange with one of my classes today - I wanted to show them an American Christmas tradition that they would not have heard of yet. Their instructions were to find the strangest, most ridiculous or most useless gift they could, and preferably not to spend any money. I was a bit worried that it wouldn't work out actually, and they would all show up with beautiful fancy gifts, but they didn't disappoint me at all. They brought in some of the most useless crap you could imagine, all nicely wrapped in bags from the 100 yen store.

I also found a small fake tree and some ornaments that my predecessor had left in the apartment, so I brought it in and had the students decorate it.

Decorating our tree

Then I told them the story of what Americans do on Christmas, while my co-teacher translated as needed. I talked about the fun of decorating the tree and how many of the ornaments have a story or special meaning behind them, little kids believing in Santa Claus, parents hiding the gifts, leaving out milk and cookies on Christmas Eve, waking up early on Christmas morning and running down to find all your presents and then running into Mom and Dad's room to wake them up.

As I was talking I became so aware of what a complex tradition Christmas really is -- there is so much to tell! But of course you can't really understand the specialness of Christmas unless you experience it first hand, and grow up with it. But I did my best to convey just a teeny bit of what it means to us. As I was describing this stuff I started to get really nostalgic and even a bit homesick - this is my third Christmas away from home! The past two years it didn't bother me at all, but this year it does. It is easy to just not think about it most of the time, but standing there today trying to describe it to a class really brought on the flood of memories. I suddenly wanted nothing more than to be back home sitting in my parents' living room in front of a fully lit tree and listening to Silver Bells. (On a side note, some friends and I went to karaoke the other night and sang some Christmas songs. Now that was weird. )

Christmas is not celebrated in Japan, since it is not a Christian country. But it is recognized, and they have totally jumped on the merchandising bandwagon. All the stores have Christmas stuff for sale, and many houses have lights. And music, oh my god. It is almost worse than back home - the first Christmas display I saw was before Halloween. But the day itself is not a public holiday. Couples go out to have special dinners, but it is not a family gathering day or anything like that. So being here as a foreigner is tough -- you get all the annoying parts of Christmas with none of the special parts! I think of it as the Japanese psuedo-Christmas.

Alright, enough nostalgia, back to the gift exchange --

Me explaining Christmas to the class. I love the fact that nobody is looking at me in this photo. But I swear they were listening!

The students seemed to like the idea of the White Elephant gift exchange, but there was one cultural glich that I hadn't counted on. You know how the best part of a gift exchange is stealing gifts from other people, and how there is always that one gift that everyone fights over? Well, I noticed about half-way through that nobody was stealing anything, even though the gift everyone clearly wanted had already been taken. So I asked my co-teacher and he explained why -- they were all afraid of "breaking their relations" with each other by stealing a gift. In other words, they were being polite for fear of creating disharmony with their classmates. How very Japanese, of course! They could only steal from someone that was their very close friend, but not from somebody that was a casual friend.

The first girl to take the most popular gift, a Winnie the Pooh dressed in a kappa costume.

Juri discovering that her gift is an empty candy container.

This is Haraguchi-sensei, my co-teacher. His gift was 5 pieces of old candy and an expired coupon.

One of the better gifts!

Mayu was the lucky girl to end up with my gift, a bundle of wooden chopsticks.

The first student who had the guts to steal a gift from her friend.

Airi, one of the most outgoing students, shopping for her gift.

"Hand it over beotch!" Someone else gets the guts to steal.

So I think they liked it, even though some of them were disappointed in their gift (who wouldn't be disappointed after getting a handful of dried out pens?) I wonder if they think Americans are weirdos for doing this sort of thing? But whatever, we still had fun!