Monday, December 15, 2008

There's a happy feeling nothing in the world can buy...

Quick! What's the next line of the song? You have 10 seconds, starting NOW. (No peeking!)

The Santa duo -- with a little elf (named Ayaka) who snuck in the picture :)

If you said "as we pass around the coffee and the pumpkin pie," you are RIGHT! If you sang it, bonus points for you. :) Oh, and if you said "chocolate" instead of "coffee," you get partial credit since I've heard that in one version. (Personally, I think it should be chocolate since it gives me a happier feeling than coffee does. Ok, you can get full credit after all; I'm in the Christmas spirit!)

Anyway...

I've been playing Christmas games lately (could you tell!?) and have been to three parties in the last four days! It's been marvelous.

The picture above and the one right below are from the party I had for my dance group yesterday. We ate lots of food and had lots of fun, regardless of the fact that none of them speak English well. We played this game of pass-the-candy-cane-around-like-crazy until the candy cane broke into a bunch of pieces, turning the game into a candy cane fight. Good times!

My table has a blanket under it because it's a special kind of heated table called a kotatsu. The food we're eating includes fried chicken, soba noodles, some kind of rice/seafood dish and grilled chicken skewers, called yakitori. (Dessert was the next course -- cream puffs, cookies and two kinds of cake!)

Sweets were a big part of my Christmas party at Mugyo on Thursday, too. We had Christmas cookie baking/decorating/eating time, followed by a couple of games and a present exchange:

Atsumi and Aki painting cookies, thanks to the (American) Cookie Kit from the Barnetts. :)

Shoma's finished cookies! The one on the top right is a mouth. Don't ask me why. I don't know.

No school Christmas party is complete without a game of Tackle the Student! Err...I mean Musical Chairs. :)

The ALT Christmas party was on Saturday night. There were a lot of people there and we watched a few of the Christmas classics, like "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," "Frosty the Snowman" and..."Muppets Christmas Carol," haha.

Oh, and guess what -- there was pumpkin pie!! And lots of chocolate! Of course there were happy feelings, too. :)

4 comments:

jelly said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

Daaayna,
It looked like you had a lot of fun at your Christmas parties! I like how every other paragraph in your blog was either red or green!
Can't wait to see you! Let chat this week what you think?
Love you!

Dawn said...

Sounds like the parties were a ton of fun. Better save up some Christmas spirit for when you get back here - LOL - since it's not quite Christmas yet.

Unknown said...

Hey my love!

Christmas parties....yea!!!!!! It sounds and looks like the fun has just begun and is not letting up...:) Just the way it aught to be.
Lots of love!!! I can't wait to see you..............