New Years - Japanese Style

For Japanese, New Years or "Shogatsu" is the biggest holiday of the year. [Click on the Shogatsu link for another foreigner's webpage (who we don't know), with great photos that we wish we would have taken!]

On January 1st, we went to Sarah's friend Miwa's house, and enjoyed (well, at least tried) traditional new years food Oseichi Ryouri. It was a fun evening, sitting on the floor and applying our Japanese. They have a little girl, Yuzuki, who is Olivia's age.


On Jan 2nd, we went to our friends Manabu & Minako's house for Okonomiyaki lunch. A fun food to make together, mixing egg, flour, pork, mochi, shrimp, and various other things. Manabu and Minako are probably our best "couple" friends, and they have a daughter about the same age as Olivia. (They came to the church Christmas party with us in December.)

Things we are thankful for this year

Sarah's Post ...

We wanted to show you all, through pictures, some big things we are thankful for from this past year:

We are so thankful that we are now in our new house in Japan, after almost a year of traveling for support raising! We were sad to leave our friends and family, yet very thankful to be settled with all of our belongings and be our own family of 4 again.


We are also so thankful to God for Grandma Pfeil's (Jon's mom) health. God has been so gracious to her, and us, this past year. She is now done with all of her cancer treatments and is doing very well. We were also thankful that we were able to see her this past summer, and look forward to seeing her in Japan at the end of January!

The last thing we are thankful for is that Mimi Harrington (my mom) was able to come visit us this fall. It was such a blessing to be able to show her our world over here. Olivia had such fun doing tea parties with her Mimi. What a wonderful year this has been!

Joining in Christmas Plays - Dec 24th

Sarah's Post...

We're catching up on some old posts that needed to be posted! Sorry for the delay!


Jon had the privilege of being a wiseman in an outdoor live nativity. It was very cold and only two people came, but hey, he looked good!


Olivia was a little angel, last minute in the Christmas play at church. She was a little nervous throughout the play and when I told her to walk out on stage, she ran to Daddy! She eventually came back out. Everyone thought that she was so cute. Enjoy these pictures!






This is Meg Dingle (our neighbor and team member's daughter) and Olivia (while she was excited about being an angel.













This is Olivia after the performance. Hey, it was pretty hard!

Video Clip from Dec 21 Party

A Japanese friend of ours took video of our presentation on Dec 21 (click to see previous post) at the Child Development Center in Naka Karuizawa. See below for a short clip of us singing "Away in a Manger" in Japanese. We also read the Christmas Story in Japanese using a Japanese picture book. It was a great opportunity to share the real meaning of Christmas to many of Olivia's and Annabella's friends.


Here is another posting of the same video though a different video hosting site. Please compare and comment!

Olivia's New Pink Guitar (Video!)

Hello everyone, Olivia's grand performance on her new Pink Guitar from Christmas will be our Video Blogging debut. Please enjoy, and let us know if you have comments or troubles viewing the clip.



The clip ends in an all to familiar way ... :)

Christmas Party

Sarah's Post...

We finally had our Christmas party at my jidokan. What a fun event it was! We had over 50 moms and kids come to the party. We had fun decorating crowns and halos. The kids, and moms, really got into it. I opened the party with a little greeting in Japanese. A big feat for me! They seemed blessed that I tried. We then did the craft. While the craft was finishing up, I shared some Christmas traditions from my childhood.







This is Sawa-chan to the right. She is a little angel. So cute!














This is Mayo-chan to the left. She was so very proud of her crown.





After the craft was finished, Jon led in the reading of the Christmas story. He did a wonderful job! I'm so proud of him! He then played guitar and sang some Christmas songs in Japanese and English. We all had a wonderful time! As the kids left, we gave them some Christmas cookies to take home. What a blessing to share the true meaning of Christmas with our new friends.

Christmas Outreach Event at Church

Sarah's Post....

Thank you to those of you who prayed! God was so good to us this weekend. We invited two of my friends to this outreach event at our church. Miwa-san and her daughter as well as Minako-san with her husband and daughter all came (you may remember that they came to make cookies at our house). We were also surprised that my friend Kyoko-san came with her family. She had read about it in the newspaper and decided to come. God is so good! As far as we know none of these families had ever been into a church building or heard the Christmas story before.


Above are the kids from church acting out the Christmas story, and to the right are Minako-san and her family. They invited us to come to their house sometime soon. We are really looking forward to this! Please continue to pray as we have one more big Christmas event coming up on this Thursday (your Wednesday night). All of these ladies (and Minako-san's husband, too!) will be at this event. Please pray that God keeps our family healthy for this last event as well as for the Moms and kids that come.

Jon's Jidokan Christmas Party

Sarah's Post...

We arranged to have this Christmas Party for our friends at Jon's Jidokan (yes, we each have our own!). We had a good turnout, six mom and kid pairs! They were very excited to make these crowns and halos to represent the Christmas story. Jon did is great job reading the story, all in Japanese! We didn't get as much response as we hoped from the story, but we realize that most had probably never heard it before!

The moms and kids really enjoyed the Christmas cookies that we had for a snack. We also were able to swap cultural norms related to the holidays of Christmas and New Years (Shogatsu in Japan). They were all amazed that people in America go back to work on the second of January. (In Japan New Years is much bigger that Christmas.) They also enjoyed seeing my scrapbook. They seemed possibly interested in having me come back to do a scrapbooking class. Please continue to pray for these events!

Our December Prayer Letter

(Please click on prayer letter image to enlarge.)

Jon's "Debut" - at Jidokan Christmas Party

I had the great opportunity to join in as a "special guest" at our local Kyu-Karuizawa Jidokan Christmas party. It actually didn't seem much like a Christmas party, with main event being a strange masked magician (Olivia was scared!) It was up to me to bring a bit of light - Jesus' Light - into a rather dark party.

I had been practicing what I wanted to say for days, and I think it went pretty well. Before we sang Jingle Bells "Jinguru Beru", I tried to open with a little interaction with the 60+ kids in the room. A slightly scary prospect, since I couldn't predict what they would say!!!

After playing a few songs (in English and Japanese) we ended with Silent Night - probably the most well known Christmas song in Japan. I asked if anyone knew what the song was about. I shared that it was about the first Christmas, and the birth ~2000 years ago of Jesus Christ. (A fact most do not know.) I said that Jesus also has another name - Emmanuel - which the wonderful meaning "The True God is with us". (I wanted to distinguish the term "God" from the normal usage in Shinto context.)

This may not seem like much, but I was very pleased to have the time and vocab (!) to say it. This is evangelism in Japan - laying single bricks at a time, building a foundation of understanding upon which the Gospel can stand. There are so many critical concepts in Christianity we take for granted in America, that Japanese have no idea about.
Here with are with Hasegawa-san, one of the Jodoukan leaders, dressed in a only moderately convincing Santa suit. :) The cute little blond girl is our new neighbor, Meg. Her parents, Kevin & Rebecca Dingle, are MTW teammates studying at our same language school.

Here is a picture of the girls at another party at Megumi Chalet (a Christian conference center nearby). Olivia and Meg have become good friends, although they don't always see "eye to eye" :)