In Japan, putting off your Christmas shopping until the last minute isn’t that big of a deal unless you want something popular or you want chicken. Then things get kind of complicated.

Our youngest chose a game for her 3DS and, since I was already most of the way to Tokyo, I decided to head to one of my favorite stores and see if they had the game. They didn’t and neither did another store so we had to order it on-line. The problem was the deliver was guaranteed “from the 25th to the 29th” because, apparently, the store selling the game learned customer service from a phone company and/or large cable company.

The item is currently “on its way” but won’t arrive for Christmas morning. Instead our youngest will get an IOU.

Our oldest is on the naughty list. Long story.

While I was out doing our last minute Christmas shopping (which technically, is our actual Christmas shopping) I stopped by KFC to get fried fish. (Yes, really.)

The small restaurant had been cut in half with a few seats available for customers and the rest taken up by a table full of cooked chicken. One Christmas tradition a lot of Japanese families have is they order some sort of chicken for Christmas lunch or dinner. KFC provides the pieces for entire banquet, but they have to be ordered well in advance and the slots to get them tend to fill up fast. (That’s a long story involving calendars and red markers.)

Apparently I walked into pick up time, although no one actually picked up an order when I was there which made what happened next especially annoying.

While I was in line, the few remaining seats filled up with the bags and jackets of the people behind me in line. I was left standing and glaring at a woman who’d clearly finished a long time before but was engrossed in her smart phone and her selfishness.

I, of course, responded with a calm, quite and Christmassy “F@#k you. And f@#k you. And f@#k you.” before being directed to a seat that was little more than a stool on the far side of the line of people who just taken all the seats.

I calmed down and enjoyed my lunch and resisted the urge to leave my trash for someone else to clean up. Instead, I disposed of everything properly.

I do, however, kind of wish I tried to buy a chicken.  (More on that in another post.)

One of my favorite Japanese traditions is that people do their spring cleaning in winter rather than in the spring. It has something to do with cleaning out the crap of the old year and leaving the space clean for the new year. Some of them even burn their old calendars in ritual bonfires. (More on that later.)

The tradition is called susuharai ( 煤払い)–literally “brushing off the soot”–and is done in temples and homes. This year, I’ve decided to brush the soot off the variety room by getting rid of old projects, hobbies and habits.

One of my hardest to break habits is a tendency to keep old projects long after I’ve lost interest in the project. I do well on a project until I reach a distraction (exam time; work; family trips, etc.) and then never get back to the project with the same energy and interest.

Because of this, I have
–several partly finished books (“partly finished” being a very loose term of a few to many pages)
–an abandoned notebook where I’d intended to copy down famous poems I liked because, well, I’m sure there was a reason at the time;
–several half filled notebooks full of brainstormed ideas with notes that no longer make any sense;
–several notebooks full of daily “10 Ideas”;
–a handmade notebook where I’d started to record the most interesting of the 10 ideas;
–random scraps of paper that must have had significance a couple years ago when I decided to save them.
–Several folders full of random scraps and notes.

This clutter tends to occupy both physical and mental space. Lately it’s been creeping out onto my desk and the piles there are getting taller and more precariously balanced.

To go through things, I’ve flipped the piles upside down and started with the oldest layers where the dinosaur bones are. I then ask a few questions:

What the hell is this?
Did I finish it?
Can I digitize it?
If I digitize it, am i really going to do something with it?
No, really, what am I going to do with it and when?

In most cases it’s the last two questions, especially “when?”, that get things sent to the trash bin. I have a smaller pile of things to digitize (the most interesting of the 10 Ideas) and then I’m trashing the old notebooks and notes.

I actually like the idea of getting rid of the old year in a bonfire. A lot of stuff might end up there.

But that would be another project that gets put in a pile (the “to be burned” pile) and put off until another day.

Instead, I’ll just shred and throw away. The Japanese burn their trash so it’s already going to a bonfire. It’s not as much fun as watching it burn in person, but at least the clutter’s off my desk and out of my head.

There’s a moment in the horror movie The Strangers when Liv Tyler’s character asks one of the masked home invaders why they were torturing her and her family. The masked invader (known as Dollface) says “Because you were home”.

In my case the answer is “Because you are husband”.

For reasons I don’t fully understand, our girls’ piano teacher and her colleagues schedule a large performance in the middle of December. It falls after the girls’ final exams but before the end of school. This is great for them, but not so great for me as I’m in the middle of marking exams and I lose most of a Sunday by going to see our girls perform for a few minutes.

The last couple years this has been complicated by the arrival of the strangers, er, the in-laws who arrive to see the performance. Last year they stayed at our small apartment and I told She Who Must Be Obeyed to never, ever do that again during exams. This is partly because I’m torn between doing my job and playing gracious host.

Gracious host, however, doesn’t pay that well so I tend to opt for doing my job whilst everyone else has a good time. I then get called out for being rude. My reaction usually is, “I know, I know. Now let me finish marking so I can stop being rude.”

Now, I know you’re thinking “Why don’t you just plan for this and get your marking done early?” First, we don’t control the schedule of the exams so we may not have much time to do our marking before pass back classes. Second, I only found out the in-laws were in-bound last Monday in an “Oh, by the way, did I tell you XYZ?” (I’ve been getting that a lot lately from other sources, too–more on that in another post.)

Granted, they aren’t staying the night, but they did spend the afternoon here and we had a big dinner out. Once again, I got to play the rude host. I did get a lot of marking done, though.