And So The Damn Stupid Season Begins

I'm not a fan of Christmas. In fact I'd go so far as to say I loathe it. The last time I was in Japan I managed to avoid it almost completely as it's not widely celebrated and I had school that day so I was able to miss out on most of it. This year however, being surrounded by a lot more foreigners than last time, I was unable to hide from the garish abundance of red and green completely. The first onslaught came when Welsh JET Jo decided to organise a carolling outing for us around Mineyama. We assembled at her house on Friday 2^nd December in our gay apparel, some gayer than others, and chowed down on mince pies and biscuits as we practised our singing with mouths full. We had a list of places that had requested we sing there but we knew we couldn't fulfil all of them in one night together so we split into two groups, the town group and the temple group and piled into the cars. Our first stop was Mineyama Station where all of us sung and Jo handed out little printed books of the programme for us and the innocent bystanders subject to our attempts at singing. Song number one was the Twelve Days of Christmas. We didn't actually take into account how long this song actually is when you go through all of the days, and so the people who had invited us to sing at the station waited patiently for us to move onto the next song, but the young delinquents who had stumbled upon our show of goodwill thought it was the perfect excuse to practise their truly wretched singing. 

At Mineyama Station. After the 7th day of Christmas, as expected,
the locals were getting sore feet.

From here we went to our assigned places and because I was in the temple group we travelled outside of town and a little into the hills to a large temple where a old priest and his daughter's family lived and here they got the Condensed Twelve Days of Christmas where they have to do without the presents for a while but on the 12^th day they are given an onslaught of presents and they scarcely know what do with this ridiculous number of birds, little boys, girls off the farm and finicky lords. Other fabulous hits included Rocking and/or Rolling Around The Christmas Tree and Walking In a Slushy Winter Wonderland.

Temple Group decked out in their gay apparel.

We were supposed to meet up with the others at this stage at Yukari's house but Diana thought the photos she took of us with the candles looked cool so we spent the next half an hour taking pictures of each other holding candles and looking lovingly into each others eyes, and when we could no longer feel our toes we moved on to Yukari's house. The other group had arrived back well before us and so a party was in full swing as we stumbled in through the door of Yukari's home and English school and had a glass of wine poured for us and more snacks prepared. We stayed here drinking until the wee small hours with a trip to McDonald's for chips at some stage. As we walked back to Jo's house one of the boys who had sung along with us at the station drove up beside us on his bike and wanted to practise his English with us, he wasn't the delinquent he came across as before without his friends so he accompanied us back, then it was home after a loooong evening.