He Remembers!

This Christmas was so much different here in Sapporo, with two feet of snow, dinner with a missionary family, seeing mail trucks come and go on Christmas Day. We had a feast at the Cookseys' house, and a couple days later I ate squid, beans and radishes as part of a New Year meal.

But you know what I missed the most?

I kept remembering our own secret family tradition of sitting around the table on Christmas Day eating all kinds of cheese, sausage, crackers, this incredible sweet-hot mustard - enough to give you a heart attack on the spot. But the heart attack never happened, so each year my family (first four of us, then three of us) watched Christmas movies and ate cheese together. Very festive. You'd have to be there.

But Christmas in Japan was different. Christmas Day came and went, then New Year's Day, and then the slump after New Year's when universities are closed and classes are finished. What to do...?

On a day like this I found a package slip with my name on it in the mailbox, and went to pick up the wrapped cardboard box from a snowy post office window.

Inside was a letter from my friend Mike, and - would you believe - six different kinds of cheese, a jar of strawberry preserves, and (I'm not making this up) a small jar labeled "sweet-hot mustard."

"My mom got these things in a Christmas package and didn't want them," Mike had written. "So I decided to send them to you since you probably don't get much cheese in Japan."

Oh, how He remembers...