New Year's Meal 2007

For a special New Year's, Daisuke and Makiko invited us over for traditional o-sechi, the traditional boxed food eaten only in the first few days of the new year. All the food inside the osechi boxes (jubako)is prepared before the end of the previous year and is meant (in part) to appease the gods of fire by avoiding the use of fire. Most of the individual osechi foods also have a specific symbolic meaning and Japanese can pay hundreds of dollars for a single set. Ours were originally a gift from Daisuke's father.
These boxes were full of different kinds of Japanese caviar, fish, and even rolls made out of the rubbery (but delicious) flesh of giant sea-slugs.

Christmas Day 2006

On Christmas Day our friends Makiko and Daisuke invited us over for a sumptuous feast and an evening of gingerbread train making (we'd constructed the gingerbread parts a few weeks earlier). As Christo pointed out, a continuation of my valiant efforts to keep the family tradition of gingerbread making alive.

The train, complete with marzipan animals.

A close-up.

Later in the evening Luna dressed up in my beautiful silk kimono (praised again by Makiko).

And we all drank wine and sake and were looking rather cheerful!

For some reason I didn't end up with any good pictures of M, D and Y so here they are at the Japanese-style barbequed meat meal we had the evening before (after visiting Ise).