Happy New Year 2021

明けましておめでとうございます！今年もよろしくお願いします。

Happy new year, everyone! 2020 was a very interesting and stressful year. I hope 2021 treats the world a little better.

This year the Bear family spent a quiet holiday season at home. We focused on spending more quality time together and eating some good food.

Baby Bear was very excited for Christmas, and worked hard on writing the alphabet so he could write a letter to Santa this year. He had his heart set on Santa bringing him some legos, and Santa did not dissapoint! I think it helped that we also made some gingerbread cookies to leave out for Santa. *wink* Baby Bear also received a few games so we have been playing board games and card games every night after dinner.

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Christmas morning

This year since Christmas was on a Friday I decided to take the day off from work. Now that we have an oven I also wanted to make our Christmas cake, and Baby Bear helped. We baked the cake on Christmas eve and decorated it on Christmas day. It was delicious! Papa Bear even said he liked it better than cakes we ordered in previous years.

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Christmas Strawberry Shortcake

Although it wasn’t fried chicken, we did have oven roasted chicken for dinner since that is the custom here in Japan.

Christmas dinner

We had a very lowkey New Year’s Eve as well. We watched a couple of movies together and started the traditional 大掃除 (deep clean). We did step out to pick up a few organizational items from the home goods store and swing by the grocery store to get ingredients for dinner.

New rack to organise the back room

We decided to have a traditional Japanese dinner of 年越しそば (soba noodles) and sushi. Baby Bear and Papa Bear actually prefer udon over soba noodles, so they had some udon instead.

NYE dinner

Recently Baby Bear has gotten more adventurous when it comes to food and found out that he loves tuna rolls! He ate most of the tuna rolls in that photo.

We let Baby Bear stay up a little later than usual to play some games, then Papa Bear and I watched 紅白 (a popular NYE music show) until midnight. I also made apple cinnamon rolls for New Year’s morning. Yum!

We hope you have enjoyed reading our blog and hope you will continue to follow our family this year too.

Happy New Year from the Bear Family!!