It's Beginning To Feel A Lot Like Christmas

The Connect Team Share Their Christmas Traditions & Rituals

Fergus Gregg (Kobe)

It’s that time of the year. Shopping centres start playing seasonal jingles, Mariah Carey’s incessant song becomes a frequent earworm, and if you’re like me, you start pining for home. As my first Christmas away from Australia in a few years, I become easily nostalgic for our traditions. In my home, Christmas is a summer affair through and through.

We start with my nephew jumping up and down on my bed, tirelessly excited for the day of presents and games that awaits him, then we exchange gifts. After that a large Australian breakfast is served, typically consisting of “Brekkie Burgers” crafted with lashings of barbecued bacon, buttered mushrooms cooked in a saucepan, perfectly poached eggs and topped with Heinz’s finest BBQ sauce.

After this delight, we hit the beach. There we recline for hours; typically my mother and I read in the dunes, whilst my father takes my nephew boogie boarding and splashing in the shallows. After we’ve all worked on our tans, or in my case fought off sunburn, we return to the house. Family members from across the states start to turn up. Aunts and uncles I haven’t seen in months, as well as happy cousins looking for some light-hearted holiday fun.

The spread is inspired: honeyed ham, prawns on buttered bread, and fresh trout. After lunch, we get to my particularly favourite holiday tradition— the films!

My mum, dad, sister and I all crowd together to watch Bridget Jones’s Diary, Love Actually and of course, The Holiday. When it comes to Christmas I’m as basic as they come, so sue me.

With all this at the forefront of my mind, I’ve reached out to some of my colleagues here at CONNECT to find out how they celebrate the holidays and get in the mood. So enjoy these excerpts of the winter season!

The Weather Outside is Frightful

Jon Smoldson’s (Hokkaido) Winter Wonderland

In a column dedicated to personal traditions, perhaps it’s a little unproductive to highlight ideas that are deeply embedded in the holiday landscape. Avoiding cliches and religious connotations seems standard nowadays. But like, you gotta have Bing at Christmas, don’t ya?

While his spirit haunts the shopping malls and car radios of December, old man Crosby is no less welcome in my home. Onto the playlist he goes. Yes, he shares the glorious stage of my crackling Bluetooth speaker with contemporary pretenders to the throne—Buble, Carey, WAM, et al.—but we all know who reigns supreme. The dulcet tones of the OG-croon-daddy ring through the home with a lazily confident step. I can almost hear my father’s half-baked attempts to match. What option does one have? I drop to an exaggerated baritone and belt out, “IT’S BEGINNING TO LOOK A LOT LIKE CHRISTMAS . . .” Of course, it takes only a few moments to remember that I now share thin Japanese apartment walls, and bring the volume back to a more reasonable level, lest I share a little too much holiday spirit.

Jon Solmundson is a second-year JET and CONNECT Copy Editor. This Christmas you'll find him prancing through the snow, camera in hand, enjoying the festive winter wonderland which so many songs and movies are fascinated with, that was unavailable to him and his fellow Australians.

Dianne Yett's Christmas-Themed Birthday (Gunma)

My family’s holiday rituals might sound a little bit strange (or funny). Whenever I get the question “Do you have Christmas cake?” from my Japanese students, it always short-circuits my brain because the answer, for me, isn’t as clear-cut. You see, I was born on Christmas Day, and while it isn’t the custom to have cake on Christmas in the U.S., it certainly IS customary to have cake on your birthday.

So, for every Christmas morning, my grandma always made spice cake out of those Pilsbury cake mixes you could buy at the grocery store. She’d bake it, throw on some cream cheese frosting, and then my dad would stick two candles in it: one for me, and one for Jesus. Guess who gets a birthday song? That’s right: me and Jesus. If that’s not a great start to a great holiday, I don’t know what is.

As for the finisher: My family really thrives on Jim Henson humour; we love everything Muppets, from the tried-andtrue The Muppet Show to Muppet Treasure Island and beyond. How do we typically spend Christmas night? By watching The Muppet Christmas Carol, of course! While it’s silly to reimagine a classic Charles Dickens tale with goofy, bug-eyed puppets in period garb, this movie will always hold a special place in my heart. It’s just the right balance of humour, drama, and camp to get me feeling the Christmas spirit.

Dianne is a third-year JET in Gunma Prefecture and a copy editor for CONNECT. If she’s not frantically trying to meet her daily word count for National Novel Writing Month, she’s hiking up her electric bill by baking adorably tiny BirthdayChristmas cakes to share with her co-workers this holiday season.

Dahlia Lemelin’s “Honmei” Party Christmas

I came to Japan after spending my teenage years hoping I could come to see my favourite Japanese bands play live. Since I’ve lived here, I can’t start to count how many times I’ve seen my favourite artist, or 本命 honmei, but December always comes with the special promise of the annual “end of year parties” and New Year countdowns live concerts. It’s often lonely in the countryside, so knowing I’ll get to meet my fellow concert enthusiast friends from all over the country coming to see our favourite musicians is reassuring and exciting.

The process of planning our meeting, finding the perfect outfit, and sharing this passion we have for supporting inspiring creative people makes it feel like a family reunion when some of us can’t see our true families. We forget, for a few hours, the loneliness of our obscure music taste unknown to most in remote countryside villages and we become one strong powerful support party. Recently, even from home, we can talk to each other watching the concert online and share emotions in real-time. Every year, I know that no matter what, Christmas is when I get to meet my chosen musical family.

Dahlia is an obscure music and fashion enthusiast that enjoys spending way too much money on live concert goods.

An Unorthodox Comfort Film

for Marco Oliveros (Tokushima)

Every year, as Christmas approaches, I feel a holiday film to get me in the holiday mood. I get under kotatsu covers, laptop in my lap, a mug of tea nearby, play button pressed on a movie inspired by the iconic Christian Nativity scene: Tokyo Godfathers, by Japanese director Satoshi Kon. A middle-aged alcoholic, a transgender woman, and a runaway teenager—all homeless—discover a baby on Christmas Eve in a manger of trash. They decide to care for the babe; what ensues is a funny, tragic, and heartfelt tale about the marginalized of society . . . plus other more traditional Christmas themes like family.

Marco is a fourth-year JET who likes studying Japanese culture and history and watching and writing about anime. On occasion, when he’s not busy and huddling for dear warmth under several layers during winter, he combines the two interests.

MERRY CHRISTMAS

The ways that we all celebrate the holidays are as varied as our backgrounds as a community. As part of the recent cohort of expats, fresh to Japan, I believe that the first step towards settling into a new home is finding new traditions and rituals. That’s why this Christmas in particular, and the perspectives of my colleagues, is so important to me.

On that note, and in the interests of creating new traditions, I’m excited this Christmas to create a favourite dish of mine in the confines of my own neighbourhood. I’ll be making a festive Gyoza Tantan Hotpot and pouring some nice sake for myself and my guests . . . before I subject them all to a veritable smorgasbord of the soppiest, cheesiest, and most festive overplayed films that Hollywood has to offer. Those poor people, hehe.

Hopefully this article, as well as the contributions of some of our CONNECT Team members, will help you readers to find new holiday traditions or even build onto your existing ones.

Happy Holidays to all of you!

Fergus is a youthful first-year JET who has stepped into Japan bright-eyed and looking for adventure. When not obsessing over horror films and literature, he can be found exploring Hyogo in search of mystery.