Alastair from the recently formed Marketing and Communications department here, hoping you all had a good rest over the new year. I’m going to write a little about spending Christmas and New Year’s Eve in Japan as a foreigner.

Being British, and raised Christian, I spent most of my life celebrating Christmas the way a lot of Britons like to: being with family, having presents under a pine tree decorated with tinsel streams and baubles and eating copious amounts of food; usually some roasted fowl, potatoes, steamed vegetables, Brussels sprouts and fruit cake. Whilst being British, I am also the grandson of Dutch immigrants, and so I spent most of my life celebrating Christmas twice: once, on December 25 as you would expect, but also once before on December 5, as Sinterklaasavond (literally, Saint Nicholas Eve). Sinterklaasavond involved eating a lot of Kruidnoten (small, round, gingerbread-like biscuits) and a Chocoladeletter (chocolate letter) for my name.

Christmas is notoriously a bit different in Japan. The Japanese are largely not Christians, and the day is not observed as a national holiday. Pine trees are quite difficult to find and gift-giving is too close to Osēbo to receive any special treatment. Most famously, KFC chicken and sponge cake are eaten in place of turkey and fruit cake. Confusingly, Christmas is celebrated on the evening of December 24 and by the morning of December 25 all the Christmas decorations, advertising and marketing has already been removed from retail. I found my first few Christmases in Japan difficult.

This year, however, I spent Christmas and New Year’s Eve at my in-laws’. On Christmas Eve, we ate fried chicken and sponge cake and drank a lot of alcohol. On New Year’s Eve we ate Osechi, drank a lot of alcohol and watched Kōhaku and Gaki no Tsukai on the television. I’ve since put on about a kilo. I recently learned there is a word for this in Japanese: 正月太り.

I used to complain that eating fried chicken isn’t the same, but I recently read that turkey wasn’t always the traditional bird, and that the North American colonists had to make do with what was available to them. I’ve not seen a whole turkey in a supermarket here, so I’m starting to think chicken is just fine. What is important, and what doesn’t change, is making sure you take enough rest from your responsibilities, spend time eating and drinking, and enjoy the company of the people you love.