Fa ra ra ra ra....Tis the season

On Monday Aaron was able to play Santa at the school I teach at. Of course it didn't come without the major stress of not knowing if his ship would actually let him off, even though he'd had it approved a month beforehand. All I could picture was 350 Japanese children waiting for a Santa who never shows up. Luckily he was able to get the morning off, but then we still had to stress out about him getting back in time to do a drill at 1:00. Luckily things went very smoothly, and passing out 350 bags of goodies went by much quicker than we anticipated.


This of course leads to Friday. Once again Aaron was supposed to play Santa, but this time at a "Nursery" school which is owned by the same man who owns the school I teach at. Rather than stress out about Aaron being able to actually rely on his prior approval to get off, I enlisted the help of a man named Neil who is in my Japanese class.



Neil proved to be a great Santa, and was encouraged....if not begged to come back next year. Neil is pretty skinny, so he looked more pregnant than fat in the Santa suit. The little ones could have cared less, and were quite convinced that he was indeed the real Santa.

My favorite part of the day was seeing the little kids dressed up in their homemade costumes. Last year I was very confused as to what the costumes were supposed to be. This year I was able to plainly see that the youngest class were elves:

And the next class were obviously.....uh, urrr........Scarecrows???

I had to ask Yoko Sensei that I teach with about that one. Apparently their scarecrows wear those Chinese, rice paddy hats. Whatever they were, it was adorable.

At the end, they gave Santa (and myself) a treat, by singing Silent Night. Go figure they can sing it at schools in Japan, but not at most of the public schools in the states. Here is a short video I took of the students and teachers singing.