Four Seafood Pizzas, Three Whi-ite Russians, Two Silly Reindeer, and a Salary Ma-an in a Red Dress: A Christmas Party AEON Style

Well, this AEON party was not a well-planned affair, but sometimes it's the unplanned events that prove to be the most enjoyable. We'd talked about having it at a restaurant with lots of food and drink, but no one seemed to think about reserving a room at a restaurant until two weeks before the night of the party. Year-end parties are HUGE here in Japan, so every restaurant within a mile radius of school was booked on the 16th. We then decided to have a potluck party at the school - similar to what we did for halloween. We talked about, and even planned a game for the evening, but luckily, the party ran itself and everyone had a good time without the staff having to resort to mixer type games. Mind you, if we had planned it a little bit better, we could have had a white elephant gift exchange which would have been a lot of fun (in this society of shopping for and owning the latest clothes and accoutrements, I would have been sure to have walked away with a Burberry scarf or a Louis Vuitton wallet).

Michel and I decided that we would do a little planning of our own to insure an enjoyable evening. After quaffing a couple shot glasses of a quickly mixed drink, we went to the bathroom to change out of our work suits and into more casual attire. The day before, we bought these silly reindeer headband/masks and goofy glittery bow ties. Then in one of the classrooms, we broke out the ingredients for our evening's refreshment. Here's Michel proudly holding two of the ingredients:

We mixed the Kahlúa, milk and Stoli in a plastic pitcher and then got out our Christmas mugs from the 100 Yen shop out and poured ourselves drinks for the evening. We waited a bit for a few of the students to arrive before making our appearance. Zen was one of the earliest to arrive. Zen had had some wine before coming and was all ready to enjoy the party:

Soon, more guests started to arrive and we were all surpised when our former part-time teacher, Fumiko came into the room. Madoka had secretly invited her as a surprise for staff, teachers, and students. Here she is with Satomi and a couple students getting ready to chow down some seafood pizza (I did eat one piece, but I may have to order a pepperoni pizza for dinner tonight just to make up for that one slice - it wasn't that bad, but I just can't get used to it):

After a bit, Yoshiko donned my antlers and bowtie and the newlyweds posed for this pic:

When Michel and I went downstairs to let Yuichiro (one half of the crazy guys) into the building and the first thing he said was, "I need the bathroom," we thought he had been waiting outside the building for sometime and had to go, but when he came through the doors, we realized his real reason for needing the bathroom. Like at the Halloween party a couple of months ago, he decided to wear a dress - a santa dress (but he did include his cat ears from the last costume and made sure to cover his armpit hair with flesh colored duct tape - shudder). Here he is posing with Michel (Note to Michel: this is not as bad as the pic I could have posted):

Later, Kotaro put on the mask and was delighted to be surrounded by Madoka, Fumiko, Miki, and Stacy:

Here's Junko and Seiko (two of my advanced level students with our school manager, Yoshiko):

And here are the two goofy reindeers (did I actually just type an s after that word to make it plural?) with Yuichiro and Yoshiko:

It was good to see Kei too, as I never get to teach her anymore (Jess, she was thrilled when I told her you thought her skin looked so beautiful in the Halloween pics):

And here I am toward the end of the night (still wearing that awful tie) but happy to get a few minutes to catch up with Fumiko and see how she was doing. Fumiko and I used to always have our lunch at the same time on Saturdays and would have interesting chats - I miss that:

I think I took off at around 1:30 and was handed a box of doughnuts on my way out - hooray!