Christmas and New Year's Eve and Day

I've been slacking on the writing and picture taking. Pardon!

Christmas was spent at the office, but the day afterward I took off to have a Christmas party at my house. There was snow on the ground for the first time when I woke up and it snowed quite a bit in the early afternoon. The Sasayama/Tamba crew came over to celebrate and celebrate we did with a lot of food and spirits.

New Year's Eve was spent in Sasayama watching movies, eating, drinking, and going to Kasuga Shrine to watch a ceremony after midnight, drink some sake, and get an arrow to hang in the house and ward off bad luck.

New Year's Day I rolled into Kaibara and spent the better part of the day with a JTE and his family. We had lunch and dinner, played some card games, watched some manzai comedy, and went to Hachiman Shrine to pray and get our fortunes. It snowed a ton starting around 5 or 6PM. I was sent home with a lot of goodies and was safe on the roads.

It's been a nice and relaxing break.

I was going to start Kansai Kannon Pilgrimage, but couldn't get off my lazy butt. Next weekend I'll be in Kyoto for a temple stay, so I might hit up some of the temples in Kyoto. I'm not really doing it for the sake of Doing It Right, but I thought it would be a neat way to see some architechture from different prefectures with at least one constant: Kannon, the Goddess of Mercy.

When I was in Europe I enjoyed going to churches dedicated to Mother Mary and seeing what they had in common (or not) and I'm hoping this will be a similarly enjoyable experience.

I've got some more ideas brewing about in my skull for future posts. More later!


Aogaki by ~jozzig on deviantART

Here's a little sketch of Aogaki.

Peace!