Happy New Year!

So New Years Day kinda of snuck up on me this year.  I meant to post about some of the many, many Japanese traditions before now, but never managed to sit down and do it.  Better late than never....

First a little general information.....New Year's celebrations are a BIG DEAL here but not in the party hard way it is in the US.  There are certain decorations you put up, certain foods you eat, and most people travel home to spend the day with family and/or visit a shrine. It's also traditional to give one's house a good cleaning.  When I started seeing some of the stuff in the stores a couple of weeks ago I got some things, but not others (and asked a lot of questions and looked up a lot of things).  Many of the traditions come from the belief that a special New Year's spirit called the toshigami comes to visit and brings blessings.  And many of the decorations have dragons on them since 2012 is the Year of the Dragon in the Chinese zodiac.

a big kadomatsu, which welcomes the toshigami spirit,
in front of our hotel in Okinawa on the day after Christmas

a shimenawa, which wards off the bad spirits while the toshigami is visiting
(I did get us one of these for the door)

a singing, dancing dragon at Joyful Honda

kagami mochi, special New Year's rice cakes that are in
little domed, decorated packages.  they are offerings to
the toshigami spirit

I read somewhere that you don't eat the kagami mochi
until the 11th, so I'm waiting to grill ours (yes, I was told to grill it)

 I did go to the supermarket yesterday (which was New Year's Eve for us) and it was even more of a madhouse than it usually is on a Saturday.  A lot of people seemed to be buying premade food at the "bar" that is kind of like the bar at Whole Foods.  Tempura seemed popular, and since Chad had requested I try frying shrimp, I picked up some raw shrimp and made us some "tempura" (aka fried shrimp) for dinner.  I also bought edamame since everyone else was doing it (and I like it).  One thing I did not buy was one of the trays in the photo below, half of the contents of which I can't identify.

click the photo to enlarge

I did buy us a few of these cakes (also sold individually) which are really cute
but not so tasty--they are moist and dense, kind of like a strange cookie dough

If you want to know more, this is an interesting article that mentions some of the other New Year's traditions that I haven't seen or heard of personally.