Christmas card

she misspelled ‘merry’ and wrote ‘Marry Xmas!’ instead

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My mother’s hobby is drawing. She drew a Christmas tree on her Christmas card that I received yesterday. Over the years, she has gotten influenced by me for a Christmas card which she didn’t have a custom of sending. This year, she wrote ‘Merry Xmas’ in English baldly and decoratively across the tree. It must have been a big challenge for her who is not used to writing English. Sadly, she misspelled ‘merry’ and wrote ‘Marry Xmas!’ instead. For years, she has kept urging me to marry, and it finally got her. A word ‘marry’ automatically pops up in her brain when she tries to communicate with me…

 

The Christmas card my mother sent me shows her character properly. My parents sent me a Christmas present of wine prior to the cards. They usually send in their joint names, but this time there was only my father’s name on the box. I thought he sent it by himself. It made sense considering how she had snubbed me last time we met. On her Christmas card which came later, she added with pretense of being casual, “Cheers with wine!“. She apparently had to imply that she had chipped in the present…

Episode From Surviving in Japan by Hidemi Woods

Audiobook  : Japanese Dream by Hidemi Woods On Sale at online stores or apps. 
Apple Books, Audible, Google Play, Nook Audiobooks,  43 available distributors in total.

One by one I lost them

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I finished sending out my Christmas cards. Japanese people don’t have a custom to send them. Instead, they send New Year post cards. I prefer a Christmas card though because a New Year card has some restrictions. For instance, it has to be arrived on New Year’s Day, or, you can’t send nor receive it when someone related to you has died the previous year because it is regarded as bad luck. I don’t make it time-consuming but once I start writing a Christmas card, I tend to take time decorating the card with stamps or stickers. Mostly, I would send them to my grandparents on both my father’s and mother’s sides. One by one I lost them and I have sent the cards fewer and fewer. In September, my grandmother on my mother’s side passed away. She was the last grandparent of mine. Now I have no grandparents and the number of Christmas cards I send is so small…

Episode From Surviving in Japan by Hidemi Woods

Audiobook  : Japanese Dream by Hidemi Woods On Sale at online stores or apps. 
Apple Books, Audible, Google Play, Nook Audiobooks,  43 available distributors in total.

Podcast: only evil people in this world

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Episode from  An Old Tree in Kyoto: How a Japanese girl got freedom  by Hidemi Woods 
 
Audiobook : Japanese Dream by Hidemi Woods On Sale at online stores or apps.  Apple, Audible, Google Play, Nook Audiobooks,  43 available distributors in total 
 
When I was little, my mother constantly said bad things about others. She believed that, even when someone was kind to her, there must have been some plot behind the nice gesture. To sum up what she talked about every day, there are only evil people in this world.
In kindergarten, mothers would fix a lunchbox for their kids and the kids would eat lunch with their classmates and their teacher. At one lunchtime, when I was opening a lid of my lunchbox, I inadvertently dropped it to the floor without having a single bite and it overturned there. I lost my lunch. While other kids laughed at me, my teacher, who had been trying so hard to make me play with other kids because I had ignored them and had hardly talked to anyone, cleaned up the mess for me and took me to a small candy store outside the kindergarten.
She told me to pick any bread I liked. I picked one timidly, feeling afraid what kind of trap this would be, as I didn’t have any money. She suggested one more. I couldn’t figure out what was going on and shook my head. She picked one more piece of bread by herself, took out money from her own wallet, and gave all the bread to me.
I was stunned. She bought me lunch. It was the first time that someone unrelated to me was so kind to me. Since then, I had started talking to her. Even after I finished kindergarten, I had kept exchanging letters with her and I still send her a Christmas card every year.
She was the first person who destroyed my mother’s theory of the evil world and taught me that there were some good people in this world…