Today is New Year's Eve. I totally forgot or never thought about making traditional Japanese New Year foods until Asuka emailed me pictures of my family eating them yesterday... I think I will try to bring in some Japanese tradition this year so that Madison can experience them even though she won't be able to appreciate them yet... So this morning I left Dave and Madison playing together at home and braved outside in the snow to Katagiri(Japanese grocery store) on 59th to purchase necessary ingredients for Toshikoshi Soba to eat tonight and Ozouni to eat tomorrow...
えっと、こっちの読者の人達に日本のお正月の事を少し説明してみたいんだけど、お母さん達にはわざわざ訳さないでもいいよね：）
Toshikoshi Soba is a soup dish with Buckwheat Noodles and we eat it on New Year's Eve. We do a lot of things for Good Luck so this is one of them... So good luck for the next year kind of thing.
This is what I made for our this year's Toshikoshi Soba... It was very yummy in case you are wondering...:-)
Our New Year's Day is very big and takes place of Christmas Day here... so when we get up in the morning we(Children) go to their parents and say "Akemasite Omedetou(Happy New Year)!" and the parents will give each child a small envelop containing money... We call it "Otoshidama" The amount varies by age and we would give Madison probably $5 to start and it will increase every year and the amount could be quite significant by the time you are in high school or college... And don't forget Otoshidama comes from Grand parents and other relatives also! For the first a few years my parents had put the money in my college fund but after I learned to use money and buy things I got to keep some of the money then later on all of it:-) I used to love this day but not as much now obviously I am no longer on the receiving end but the giving end... Oh well it will still be fun to give Otoshidama to Madison:-) I was hoping to find one of those envelops at the store but wasn't successful so I will probably have to make it tonight myself but an example of Otoshidama envelopes are below...
And what most people look forward to for New Year's Day is to eat Osechi Ryouri which is these boxes of food... This is over the top Osechi Ryouri that I've never had but I've had similar... Each box is filled with different ingredients that are separately prepared... Each ingredient has good meaning for example, we eat lobster because it represents long life, fish roe because it represents many children, etc...
And after getting Otoshidama from Grandparents and relatives and filling up on Osechi Ryouri, kids would play a card game called "Karuta." It's very similar to a matching game here I think... We put down all the pictured cards face up then one person(usually one of the adults who can't eat any more) would get a stack of cards with words and read one at a time out loud. The matching card with the picture describes what the adult is reading and the first letter is also on the card so the kids can either go by the picture or the letter on the card. Once you locate the matching pictured card you would slap it instead of picking it up. Then you can pick it up:-) We keep playing until all the pictured cards are picked up and whoever has most pictured cards win! I love this game and I used to have favorite pictures so I would memorize where each of them were and would throw myself over in order to be the first one to slap that card. And usually my favorite cards are someone else's favorite cards also so that could always get ugly and sometimes result in some kind of head collision... Ouch!! Yeah Good Times! I really miss playing this game:-) Oh and we have Karuta for adults too... instead of finding a matching pictured card you have to find a card that has the second half of a sentence or I should say Haiku...it can be very difficult. When I was in Junior High we had to memorize all 100 Haiku sentences and compete against different classes then against each other... Really hard but very addicting. I can't wait for Dave and Madison to be able to play it.
Another thing we do on New Year's Day is to decide on a goal for the year and fill in an eye ball into this red guy(Daruma) here... Only one eye because then at the end of the year you get to fill in the other eye if you have got to complete your goal... Goals would be like "to get into such and such high school or college" or "to run a marathon" and not like "to win a car" or "I want a hand bag!"... Very similar to the New Year's resolution but it's a bit more serious and has higher success rate.
Then each town would gather all the last year's Darumas into a pile and set them on fire one evening and everyone will gather around and visit and cook the rice cake tree thingies... kind of like s'mores but much, much healthier and we eat them for good health.
あけましておめでとう！今年もクライン家をどうぞよろしくお願いしま〜す：)Happy New Year Everyone!
