Filibuster Cartoons
The holiday is a mess of traditions and rituals, only a few of which I’ve been able to wrap my brain around during my month or so in the country. Here are some highlights:
The “Mirror Cake”
The New Year’s mirror cake is basically the Christmas tree of the season. All houses and many businesses are expected to obtain, decorate, and display one in a prominent location during the holiday season.
A traditional New Year’s mirror cake consists of two lumps of flavorless rice dough, known as mochi stacked on top of each other, with an orange then stacked on top of that. The little pile is then liberally decorated with all manner of trinkets and do-dads, like pine branches and ribbons and fans and things, which I am sure have a great deal of symbolic importance. Because the cake is made of congealed rice mush, you can leave it in the living room for many days and it won’t go bad. Or bad-er, I should say, since it’s not much of a treat to begin with.
On January 11, the cake it chopped up and eaten by the family, in a final ritual to bring in the new year. Apparently the cake it so flavorless you really have to douse it in soy sauce.
Like Christmas trees, these mirror cakes can vary vastly from family to family depending on how much effort they’re willing to put in. The hardcore folks bake their own cakes stores have big sections devoted to all sorts of expensive mirror cake decorations. Lazier folks, such as myself, can buy small, pre-decorated plastic mirror cakes, and then just buy some pre-cut pieces of rice cake to eat later.
OTHER HOLIDAY DECORATIONS
Along with the cake, the traditional (there’s that word again) New Year’s decoration consists of hanging an orange and some pine branches on your door. Again, this is done on a variety of scales—many department stores downtown will have huge elaborate branch ensembles (with real branches!), where as cheaper folks who don’t care as much can just buy plastic pre-made ones.
Here’s the little New Year’s shrine I set up in my room:
This is the big deal of the day. On New Year’s eve you’re supposed to prepare a weird and elaborate meal of many different special foods, each of which have symbolic importance (but just like with Western traditions, nobody remembers what any of the symbolism actually means anymore), then devour it all.
The meal is supposed to served in three beautiful black lacquer boxes, each subdivided into separate compartments to display each unique food. The Japanese put a lot of effort into food preparation in general, and these New Year’s boxes are no exception.
I wanted to buy a pre-made New Year’s box meal for myself, but they’re actually enormously expensive. Judging from my own observations, they can run you anywhere from 50 to over 100 bucks just for a single box, and at most of the stores you have to pre-order way in advance. So I just bought the foods and the boxes separately, and tried to clumsily assemble my own meal, sort of half understanding what I was doing. Luckily the grocery stores really get into this tradition, and set up special sections of the store with the New Year’s foods, and put happy new year’s stickers on the packages to make it even more obvious to ignoramuses like myself.
So here’s what I came up with, I bought one special box and one plastic “starter kit” sort of thing which serves basically the same purpose:
Traditional highlights to note include: shrimp, black beans, fish eggs, tiny, hard, salted, near-embryonic fish babies, and a bunch of other stuff of which I had no idea what I was either buying or eating.
The desert, melon-flavored bread with chocolate chips, is just something I like. I couldn’t figure out what the traditional New Year’s desert was.
