Some Serious Holiday Family Fun!

Before you can have fun, sometimes you have to do a little holiday preparation first. Besides all the crazy shopping sprees and shipping charges to send packages back to the other side of the civilized world, you also have to do some cleaning, cooking and decorating.

Ben was a great help with doing the dishes (my least favorite job):


Bella helped with the holiday cooking:


And Mia made sure that Bella ate all her food...and by "her", I mean Mia's food:




There are several Holiday parties you have to attend where people have maybe a little too much to drink and get crazy on the dance floor (although with this guy, I know he doesn't drink at all, so we can't blame his crazy dance moves on anything but maybe his mother or too much sugar...lol...YOU ROCKED THE DANCE FLOOR ROB!!! ;)

My good friends Melissa and Tracey!

You also have to have official holiday toe-nail art:(Mine is the bottom pair)

And you have to make some other holiday treats, like decorating gingerbread cookies, to officially bring in the holiday fun:


Our good friends, the Stinchfields provided this yummy treat for us!


Now it's time for the real family fun to start!
For Family Home Evening, we took the kids to American Village to finally ride the ginormous Farris wheel that the kids have been dying to go on since we moved here.

After paying about 1,500 yen (over $15) for all of us to ride on it for 15 minutes, (which was about one time around because the thing moved soooo slow) we knew it would be along time before we do it again:




Here is the nice view from the top of the Farris Wheel:

And on the other side, you can see our on-base housing:


Two days before Christmas, we headed to the SouthEast Botanical Gardens to see the Christmas Light Display. It was very beautiful and well done and really helped us feel that Christmas Spirit.






On Christmas Eve, we went to the Okinawa Zoo to see their Christmas light display also. Even though we had a great time playing in the "snow" they had for the kids, watching the laser show, and eating the local food, this experience was something of a Christmas Spirit killer for me.

Let me explain a bit: The local Japanese have tried their best to entertain and accommodate to all the Christian-Americans best they can, but I feel that they truly missed the mark when it comes to understanding what Christmas is all about. There were three things that tipped me off: First, they had these sweet Japanese girls come on stage wearing military camoflage hip-hop out fits and santa hats, and danced several hip-hop dances to some radical rap "Christmas" music that was a little sac-religious if you ask me. Then during one of their dances, some guy dressed like Freddie Crugar comes out with a machine gun and shoots all the dancers! He laughs, they pretend to be dead for a minute or two, which of course, left John and I looking at each other in disbelief as we covered our kids eyes, and then the dancers start coming back to life and dance the rest of their routine. (I have no pictures of that as you can well imagine why.) And then as we were leaving the Zoo after watching a somewhat amusing laser Christmas show featuring mostly Michael Jackson songs, like Thriller and Beat it, which Laser Santa does the moon walk, there was a sign with Hello Kitty and Santa that you could take pictures next to that said "Can Stop Christmas." The Japanese have issues with their grammer and translation at times for us Americans, but after the Christmas display we witnessed, I wasn't sure if the "t" was meant to be added to that "can".

There was a bright and entertaining moment though when John was pulled on stage for a bit to help a comedian Canadain with his entertainment bit. The guy went from speaking Japanese to English pretty well as he explained his tricks. This guys was very funny, but we still couldn't think of a reason why he lives all the way out here if he's not in the military.

Here is the kids playing in the "snow" that was rumored to have been shipped in from the Mainland:




But as you can see, that was not the case:

At one point during the shows, they tried to spray the snow in the air over the audience to simulate snow fall....but it was more like snowballs and large chunks of ice falling on you. If you have never experienced real snow, like most of the Okinawans, it would seem pretty disapointing.

They also made a little snow-sledding hill for the kids, but like everything else here, it cost 500 yen (almost $7-$8 with the yen to dollar crappy ratio) to go down it ONCE! Being the kind parents we are, we paid to let Ben go down it. We are crazy, I know, but hey, it was Christmas Eve! However, when Bella asked if she could, we disfused the situation and bribed her with cotton candy to not do it. LOL!

So with all the family holiday fun aside, now it's time to get down to the real business: Christmas day!

TO BE CONTINUED IN MY NEXT POST....