Christmas in Canada

We celebrated Christmas with my family in Canada last year, a first for Shuma and the first in 15 years for me. Christmas Eve began with our traditional lasagne dinner, then Shuma checked out the tree and all the Christmas loot (we'd been home for almost a week and it had been a daily battle to stop him from opening them all, but he showed restraint on Christmas Eve). Then Baboo, my dad, started a fire.

And Shuma and I opened our Christmas Eve boxes and changed into our new Christmas jammies, then after a reading of A Visit From St Nicholas we hung up our stockings.

One stocking for each person, and one for the cats.

Christmas morning brought a nice sunset, which was especially pretty glowing through the ice-encrusted branches of our trees. We'd had an ice storm, one of the worst in history, a few days before. It made the trees look beautiful, until their branches bent over and broke off- bad luck for the trees, and for the people who lost electricity when those branches took down power lines. We were lucky and although two of our trees were heavily damaged (including a beloved old willow that lost over half of its volume in branches) our power stayed on and we didn't have a cold and dark Christmas like thousands of others did.

And then everyone was up and it was time to check on the stockings. Not only were there too many presents to fit under the tree, but the stockings were so full they couldn't fit on their hooks.

Then breakfast, and after a day of playing with our new toys, dinner.

We missed Hideaki, but otherwise it was an excellent Christmas.

Comments

[Cuzzin Jen]

Cuzzin! So nice to see my family in print. Glad you made it home and had power and warmth and your parents! Kisses to my mini-cuzzin.

[shida]

hello

I live in Shizuoka Prefecture
I want to speak English, but is difficult.
It is cute child

[David]

Hi Amy,

I am just wondering that since Shuma goes to a hoikusho where they speak Japanese, what is Shuma encouraged to speak in the home? Is he on par with the other kids in the nursery?

[Commercial Refrigeration by Corr Chilled]

Hope you had a good xmas! Definitely looks like you did :)