Happy St. Nicholas Day (belated)

Upon the feast day of Santa Claus 1.0, I found myself back in Nagoya again, gettin' presents for myself and others. Would have gotten my parents' Christmas box, except the post office tends not to deliver big honkin' boxes when there is no one to which they can hand 'em over. But it got re-delivered tonight, and I gotta say, for spending a week derping through the international post system, those cookies sure aren't too pulverized :D Yay!

While in Sakae, I found the perfect way to illustrate to many hiLOLities of Kurisumasu-toki in Yapan:
Yes, that is the Colonel. Yes, KFC's Colonel. Doesn't your family uphold the cherished Western tradition of the Christmas bucket o' chicken parts? Heathens!
(and incidentally, yes, this IS a digital picture of a picture on my cell phone...I um, left my memory card at the office. Oh technology.)

The other main activities of Christmas are eating big white-frosted cakes with strawberries on them and going on dates. Perhaps dates where you eat big white-frosted cakes with strawberries on them, I dunno. The general atmosphere of Christmas and New Year's is basically the reverse of what it is in the States, except only New Year's Day is a national holiday here.

Luckily, this year the school is giving everybody the three weekdays leading up to January 1 off, no paid leave needed, thus I will be spending the holiday season up in Hokkaido :3 There I will hopefully see such wonders as their free-range moss balls (this is not a lie), only-two-snowballs snowmen, and the Japanese yeti (this may or may not be a lie).