Since we couldn’t go home to see family for Thanksgiving, I invited my two seven year old students and their moms over (Kayo and Tomoko). Since their lesson is on Thursday anyway, it seemed like the perfect solution. They had never had turkey before and were quite curious about it. Tomoko was so funny when she saw the entire bird in the pan. She was so shocked that it was SO HUGE! But, it was really only an 11 pound bird and there were 6 of us! Kayo liked the cranberries a lot, but I think the rest of them were turned off by them. Rina LOVED mashed potatoes and the stuffing seemed to go over well, too. We drank a bottle of Syrah and DJ brought out episodes of MXC. If you haven’t heard of MXC, the channel Spike TV in the U.S. bought old episodes of the 1980′s Japanese classic, Takeshi’s Castle. It’s a reality game show where the contestants have to go through many different obstacle courses. And MXC mixes clips from the show together and dubs over their voices with funny American banter. Luckily the banter is a little too fast for them to catch all the dirty jokes. The moms were really excited by the fact that they were watching the TV show they grew up with and that their kids were loving it too. And, of course, they came bearing gifts. Being invited over to someone’s home is very rare and usually only done between close friends. So, I think they enjoyed an American Thanksgiving! I know I did!

They don’t celebrate Halloween here in Japan, but they do get excited about doing so on base. And I mean both the American and Japanese kids. So I took my two seven year old students trick or treating. They have to be with an American military ID holder to get on base so they were pretty excited. Rina had gone the year before, but Risa had never been. I picked them up at 4pm and we got to base around 4:30. DJ met us at the gate and we started. It took us a little while to get into a groove, but soon we were knocking on doors and running down the stairs of the towers like mad. Risa had these pink plastic shoes on with little plastic balls in the heel so every time she took a step (especially down the hallway of stairs) she clattered like crazy. I was thankful that I wasn’t trying to rest in any of those apartments. They were both adorable though. Oddly, all the pictures came out blurry. I blame the incompetent photographer. They scored a ton of candy. The bags started to get a little heavy about halfway through and so we put some of it into plastic bags and left them in the car. At the end of the night, those bags were FULL. Their mothers probably want to kill me. It was a good night, though. I loved seeing all the kids in their costumes. I saw quite a few transformers, black spidermen and princesses. Very fun. Very fun, indeed.