Let's Toast to a New Year

I admit I started the holiday season off in a "bah humbug" sort of mood. At 28, this was my first Christmas not celebrated with my family, and I was feeling achy and homesick, missing my family, my friends back home, my cat, our Christmas tree...everything. Not only that, but work was beginning to grate on me, and I had the perpetual feeling of a cold virus creeping up in my lungs, as student after student coughed in my face in tiny, unventilated rooms while I tried to teach them English's seemingly impossible grammar.

Christmas Eve I took the day off from work and spent the afternoon cleaning my room, doing laundry, packing, drinking hot cocoa (sent to me by Miller, Megs, and Jane, along with loads of other American goodies!), and watching movies on my laptop. I watched "The Apartment" at least three times that night, along with "Penelope," "The Wackness," and finishing up with "Elf," a movie I've seen an embarrassing number of times already, but one that never fails to cheer me up.

Christmas morning I took the shinkansen (bullet train) with Simon and Liz to Hakuba in Japan's Nagano Prefecture, a 3.5-hour train ride away. We were meeting about five co-workers there for a week-long skiing/snowboarding trip in the Japanese Alps. Gazing out the window at the piney, far-from-snow-covered mountains, I felt apathetic about the whole thing, and a little bitter about spending Christmas day on a train.

But then we arrived at Lodge Tabi Tabi, a sweet little place nestled in the woods. The snow was starting to fall in giant flakes, and our friends were there waiting for us, along with several other Tabi Tabi guests, all of them instant friends. I felt the scrooge in me slowly melting away. The lodge was warm and inviting, and because it was Christmas day, they decided to have a big ole nabe Christmas dinner with beer and sake. Nothing can replace Christmas with your family, but this was the next best thing.

Hakuba had been having an unseasonably warm winter, but on Christmas night the snow fell so enchantingly and so heavily, that by 11 o'clock, the entire lodge (mostly Aussies) was outside engaged in an epic snow fight. For many, it was their first white Christmas (since it's summer in Australia at Christmas time), and their delight in the three feet of powdery snow was infectious.

The rest of the week it snowed pretty constantly, and the days were filled with skiing/boarding, the evenings spent inside the warm lodge, playing games, laughing, bantering, greeting the constant stream of new guests flooding through the door. It was, hands down, my best week in Japan thus far, and repaired everything that was breaking down inside of me after hitting the 6-month slump of living in Japan. Even the day I got stranded in a gondola with Rich, Angela, and Andrew for an hour and a half, swinging dangerously over a deep valley in 45 kilometer winds, after which we had to ski down the mountain in the dark with the winds threatening to whip our faces off, and THEN had to wait in line for 2 hours while the wind continued to kick our butts into misery so that a bus could take us home...even then I considered it a great day and fell asleep grateful to have the experience, to have been trapped in the gondola with friends who made me laugh the entire time, despite how terrified I was.

On New Year's Eve, we all went to an Australian-owned bar called Tracks, ate a dinner of delicious meat pies, and rang in the New Year on the dance floor. There was no countdown, so the actual stroke of midnight came and went without our knowledge as we jumped up and down to bad electronic music with plastic champagne glasses sloshing in our hands.

My evening ended pretty perfectly, and when I went to bed, I was content, refreshed and ready to face Osaka the next day. The following afternoon, New Year's Day, I felt a smile goofily creeping up at the corners of my mouth as I rode the train back to Osaka. It may be the first New Year's Day that I didn't feel an ounce of the holiday blues. Instead of that dreaded another-year-of-my-life-has-passed-me-by sadness, I felt overwhelmed with what an amazing life I've had so far, and not just this year, but all 28 and a half years. Sure, some were better than others, but each lead up to this moment on the train. I thought about my friends scattered everywhere, all of them so close to my heart, I thought about my incredible family and their infinite patience with me as I wander (and sometimes stumble) through life, and I thought about the places I've seen, the places I hope to see in the future, the people I've met, and those I have yet to meet. While Japan's countryside blurred passed, the snow disappeared as we headed south, and the sun gently sank below the horizon, I had an epiphany--I realized I'm happy in my life. I always have been but was too stubborn to realize it, and not even the giant cockroach that greeted me in my bedroom when I got home to Osaka could ruin the feeling that I have a good life. A great life.

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Pictures from Liz: