This is my family’s Christmas Tree.
Hello! This is Jason.
It’s that time of the year again. The air is finally turning cold and Christmas Illuminations are up all over the city. Christmas is here! This year I will be returning to my hometown as I always do every two years to spend this most important family holiday with my family. I am very thankful that Japan celebrates Christmas in some form as it gives me some cultural familiarity via its presentation of the holiday. Rather than go into the differences of how The U.S. and Japan celebrate Christmas, I would like to tell you about what Christmas means to me and how my family celebrates it.
For me Christmas is about my hometown blanketed with fresh snow and the snow keeps coming down. The air is crisp and refreshing with a faint, distant, yet identifiable smell of wood burning in fireplaces coming from neighbors’ chimneys. The roads are snowy and dangerous to the inexperienced driver, but there is an adventure in getting to your destination be it last minute shopping, or Christmas parties at a friend’s or family member’s house. It makes you that much more happy to be there and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
On Christmas Eve my family gathers at my Grandmother’s house as we always have since as long as I can remember. She prepares a traditional Christmas dinner composed of turkey, ham, cranberry salad, mashed potatoes, and all the other traditional foods. We drink red wine with the dinner and chat about happy things be it a newborn child in the family, or nostalgic memories of Christmas pasts.
After dinner we open presents we brought for each other and the adults enjoy properly made eggnog with a very healthy amount of rum added(read as mostly rum :^D) The children play with their gifts and any assembly required is usually handled by some of the male adults. After this my Grandmother serves pumpkin pie and pecan pie. This to me is the perfect end to a wonderful evening with my family.
After the party wraps up, I might head over to a friend’s family’s house to visit and catch up with them, but I don’t stay out too late. It’s usually no more than a couple of hours and everyone needs to call it a night because the holiday is only beginning. Then it’s back to my parents’ house. The snow is still coming down and it’s so quiet that the usual ambient sounds of being outside are deadened by the freshly fallen snow. The only sound to be heard is your feet compacting the snow under them and sometimes the faint sound of a horn of a freight train far off in the night somewhere. There is something very zen about this kind of quiet and it’s hard to describe unless you’ve experienced it yourself.
The next morning I’m woken up early usually by my niece informing me Santa Claus had visited and left presents. This usually happens between 5:30 to 6:00am. It’s too early on any other day, but it’s Christmas after all and you can’t help but remember how it was when you were a child. It floods me with nostalgia every time. Once everyone is up usually my Mother brews a coffee that has a Christmas blend to it. It’s usually something with cinnamon in it. It smells so good and compliments the morning festivities nicely.
Once the presents have been opened and the family dog has had her fun with all the wrapping paper, we clean up all the while my Mother prepares us a nice breakfast. Again the conversation steers to the nostalgic side of things and funny stories about each other are told while Christmas music plays softly on the stereo in the background.
The rest of the day usually involves visiting other family members’ houses for lunch or a piece of pie. Then for the evening I meet some friends for some more family Christmas parties, or drinks somewhere and catch up on their lives.
When I was young Christmas was all about the excitement of getting that present you hoped would be there under the tree for you on Christmas morning, but now as an adult it’s about getting together with family and friends to catch up over the things that distance prevented during the previous year over great food and festive drinks. In my opinion it’s the greatest holiday of the year.
Merry Christmas everyone.
Please listen and enjoy: