Tales of the Glories
of Christmases long, long ago
Before I launch into this issue, I have an important announcement (and a request).
I have been accepted into the Winter Online Writing Workshop at The Kenyon Review. I’ve also been offered a volunteering scholarship to the 2025 AWP Conference. Both provide powerful opportunities for my writing, but our finances are focused on Hiro’s upcoming cataract surgeries. I've launched a crowdfunding project to afford to attend both the workshop and the conference, and I hope and pray you’ll consider even a small donation. Thank you!
I’m scratching my head this morning, sifting through tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago.
(Yes, that’s an Andy Williams reference. My mother had two Christmas albums that left a lasting impression on little me. Andy Williams—It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year—and Barbra Streisand. The best cover of Jingle Bells will always and ever be Barbra’s. “Upsot?!”)
Christmas was always music. When our family moved to Nyack in 1973, I started third grade in a parochial school. Everything Catholic in our lives seemed to have gotten an upgrade that year in Saint Ann’s Parish, and I joined the children’s choir under the direction of our parish’s organist, George Bryant. That might have also been the first year I attended Midnight Mass. Imagine the impact the drama of that service—the darkness pierced only by candlelight, the choir in their albs and surplices, the stunning soprano (a beautiful woman from Jamaica, I think, whose name escapes me) singing O, Holy Night every year—had on my budding gay sensibilities!
I remember some classic Christmas presents: the railroad model set my brother Kevin and I were supposed to share; the Pong controller for our TV within the pile of gifts in 1979 (when friends of my parents went all out during our family’s ongoing financial troubles) that, again, Kevin and I were supposed to share.
When I started piano lessons, again under George Bryant’s tutelage, the summer after my father died in 1980, I began to collect (and keep) sheet music. By far, the second largest component in my collection was Christmas music. (The first largest will always be Mozart’s compositions for piano.) I particularly loved finding carols I had never heard before. You’ll again need to rely on your imagination, but there was something of a Liberace about me as I started playing (and singing along to) carols like Un Flambeau, Jeanette, Isabelle! and Melchior et Baltasar.
I remember the Secret Santa my college friends and I organized within our residence hall during my sophomore year and how surprised I was to receive an Opus—from Berke Breathed’s comic strip, Bloom County—plushie. I still have that gift.
Music continued in college, too. I joined the Choral Society my first year and performed with them for Lessons and Carols every December. Rehearsals in Thompson Chapel surrounded me with glorious acoustics. With the apse were banked seats for us choristers, with the tenors and basses on the west side of the chapel, facing the sopranos and altos. One year, perhaps my sophomore year, we performed the first part of Händel’s Messiah. In countless rehearsals, I aped the sopranos, lip-synching For unto us a Child is born in the hope of getting a particular tenor, my friend John Andrews, to laugh. Come performance time, I had been so in the habit of opening my mouth for those bars that I sang a few notes with the sopranos (in falsetto? The shame has blocked it from my memory). That might have been the one time I earned an icy glare from our director, Professor Roberts.
Of the ten Christmases I spent in Japan, I remember the food. TOPS Bakery had a shop in the food halls on the basement level of the Keiō Department Store in Shinjuku, and they sold the best bûche de Noël I’ve ever had. (The secret was in the ample amount of chocolate frosting.) I indulged in modern traditions like Kentucky Fried Chicken for Christmas Eve and the strawberry shortcake-inspired Christmas cakes, too.
But Christmas was just a speedbump on the highway to New Year’s in Japan, where my food memories kick into high gear. Even in 1996, after I had been discharged from a three-week stay in two different hospitals for mononucleosis—a diagnosis that stunned me; wasn’t mono for thirteen-year-old kids?—where a hematologist also noted my blood chemistry was in pre-gout territory, I insisted to Hiro that we maintain as much of the New Year’s menu as possible. The doctor forbade me from eating shellfish for six months, after which I never had gout symptoms—pre- or otherwise—again.
I sang for many of my ten years in Japan, too. When I taught in Saitama Prefecture, I first joined a local chorus. Their holiday performance (as was de rigueur for all choruses in Japan, I believe) was Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Freude!After a few years with a competition-winning small chorale, I joined the Tōkyō Schütz-Chor, a group dedicated to performing all the works of German Baroque composer Heinrich Schütz. The chorus’ musical director was (and remains) an incredible conductrix named Yumiko Tanno. I don’t remember singing many Christmas concerts, but in addition to works by Schütz, we sang the Mozart Requiem, the Bach Mass in B Minor, and very challenging works by a modern Latvian composer named Arvo Pärt. When I needed to take a job in Yokohama in 1995, I sadly left the chorus, unable to make it to rehearsals on time anymore.
Hiro took to some of the Christmas traditions I had loved after he moved to North America with me in 1998. I remember the years he took baking inspiration from our friend Kat and taught himself to make cookies and breads for Christmas gifts. Every other year or so, we put up our Christmas tree. This year, I think, we’ll limit the decorations to the beautiful ceramic ornaments my mother sends us—one each year—even though our collection of ornaments includes favorites from decades past, including ones I made as a child under the watchful eyes of my Aunt Regina and my Great Aunt Betty. Oh, and my favorite: Bugs Bunny as Carmen Miranda.
But I started this essay? missive? to identify which Christmas might have been my favorite, and I think I have an answer or two.
Hiro and I traveled to Paris late in 2000 during a Christmas visit to the UK. We boarded the Eurostar on December 23rd, intending to return the same day. (Hiro tends to find architecture and museums boring, and I convinced him that visiting Fauchon would be worth the trip. He also wanted to ride the Eurostar, if only to compare it to the bullet trains of Japan.)
I convinced him to come to the Louvre with me, and after a light lunch there, we began to tour the museum. But I fell in one of the galleries and dislocated my right shoulder, throwing our itinerary into disarray. Hiro, whose only French consisted of “un café, s’il vous plait,” ended up waiting in a hospital lounge for six hours as my anesthesia wore off—my muscles had locked, and I needed to be put under before the doctor could reset my shoulder.
The hospital found us a hotel nearby, and Hiro set out to find food in the environs. At ten that night, we ate slices of salami in the hotel room. My arm was in a sling, and my x-rays—I figured I’d need them to convince the Eurostar to re-issue tickets back to London—sat on the bedside table. After a complimentary breakfast of yogurt, fruit, cheese, meat, and a gigantic café au lait, we planned our unexpected day in Paris. First stop? Back to the Louvre, where our winter jackets remained in the coat check. But after that, Fauchon. We shopped (tea and a bottle of Sauternes) and then sat in the café for their afternoon tea service. After that, we rode the metro to Gare du Nord, where the ticket agents for the Eurostar issued us a complimentary replacement. Christmas Day was spent with London friends, eating sausage rolls and pulling Christmas crackers (with my left hand).
Fast forward to December of 2016, and the first trip to Japan Hiro and I made after ten years away. The first ten days were a blur, spending nights with friends in ten different places (Ueno (Tōkyō), Fukuoka, Tamana (Kumamoto), Kurashiki (Okayama), Ōsaka, Nagoya, Matsumoto, Okachimachi (Tōkyō, for our first and last stay at a capsule hotel), Asakusa (also in Tōkyō), and Yunokami (Fukushima) before settling into a rental apartment in my old neighborhood in Shinjuku for the final seven nights. We woke in Okachimachi on December 23 and then spent the rest of the day in Saitama, where I spent my first three years in Japan, touring my old neighborhood and the city of Kawagoe with one of my teaching colleagues, Yūichi Tsunoda (may he rest in peace). Mr. Tsunoda was experiencing stage 4 intestinal cancer, but he had planned an entire day for Hiro (who Mr. Tsunoda had never met before) and me.
We all stopped to pray at the shrine a block away from my old apartment building. I had brought Hiro to that shrine during our second date (my oldest photo is of him, there), but when I bowed my head, I prayed instead (in vain) for a miracle for Mr. Tsunoda. I had followed his blog, documenting the progress of his cancer and the different treatments he had tried, because, Hiro reminded me, that I loved him. Mr. Tsunoda and a few other members of the English faculty at Okegawa Senior High (including Mr. Hamatsu, who had died of an aneurysm in the 2000s, may he rest in peace, and Mr. Fukumoto, who fell out of touch with both Mr. Tsunoda and me before I left Japan in 1998) had been my first friends in Japan. It was Mr. Tsunoda who shopped for sheet music with me (he played the bassoon, but he used the Italian name, fagotto, to see me smile), and Mr. Tsunoda who encouraged me to start buying the Philips collection of all of Mozart’s works. When I let Mr. Tsunoda know that I was coming to Japan in 2016, he immediately asked me to visit with him and when I raised a concern—did he know I had married Hiro? Heck, did he even know I was gay?—he laughed it all off. “Of course, I know these things, Brian! I follow you on Twitter!”
Our Saitama tour on December 23, 2016, ended with dinner in Mr. Tsunoda’s favorite izakaya, a hole-in-the-wall pub where the proprietress made everything herself, including the first drinking snack I had ever fallen in love with: batons of cheese deep-fried in wonton wrappers. Throughout our day together, I marveled at Mr. Tsunoda’s stamina and often asked if we should relax more during the tour. But he laughed off every suggestion, stopping only once at his apartment in Kawagoe to attend to his colostomy bag.
(After Hiro and I returned to Seattle, we compiled all the photos we had taken on that Saitama day and emailed them to Mr. Tsunoda. We sent messages back and forth for a few more months until I learned on Mr. Tsunoda’s blog that he had passed—his physician made the final entry.)
On December 24, 2016, Hiro and I boarded the bullet train to Fukushima, where we changed to a local train. The first destination was a reconstructed school for children of samurai in service to the local lord. One of Hiro’s ancestors, unknown to either of us, had taught there—his family name is rare in Japan, and when it appeared on a diorama display of a classroom, I knew there was a connection. That night, we took a one-car train from the city of Wakamatsu into the mountains, to Yunokami, a hot springs town.
Hiro had chosen an inn for us there, a small place with rooms for only eight guests. The person who met us at the station was the son of the inn’s owner, a delightful old lady whose Fukushima dialect reminded Hiro of his paternal grandmother’s. She met us at the entrance and took us upstairs to the Paulownia Room, our room for the night. Bathe first? Or dinner? We chose dinner.
In the dining room, she offered me both a chair and a fork. I accepted the former—I can sit on tatami mats for short periods, but my posterior appreciated the chair—and politely declined the latter. (Decades ago, I was the too-sensitive gaijin who bristled at the assumption that I couldn’t use chopsticks, a skill I had practiced before I even left for Japan in 1988, but time had allowed me to see the kindness with which people like our inn’s owner hoped to make me more comfortable.)
The table was already spread with dishes. [insert photo] Because we stayed at Inariya, the signature dish was the largest inari sushi I had ever seen. There was pickled radish, stewed lotus root and carrot, tomatoes, a plate of raw shrimp and salmon with elaborate radish and cucumber garnishes, a covered bowl of braised radish, carrot, and bamboo shoot, and a personal hibachi on which several slices of pork were grilling. But that was only the beginning. The owner brought us roasted local potatoes, a skewered sweetfish roasted in salt, and bowls of soba. Her son arrived with a massive plate of tempura vegetables, all locally harvested, including mushrooms, eggplant, and a variety of leafy greens. Instead of a bowl of cooked rice came a paddle of grilled sticky rice, lightly basted in a sweet miso.
Even Hiro couldn’t finish everything offered, and the owner kindly packed up the tempura for us to enjoy on our long train ride back to Tōkyō on Christmas Day. Realizing that Hiro and I were the last couple in the dining room—the three other couples had arrived earlier than we had—the owner came to our table with a conspiratorial gleam in her eye. “Everyone else has already bathed. I can let the two of you use the women’s bath if you like. It’s larger.” Hiro and I giggled and agreed.
The bath was partially exposed to the night air, and soaking in a rock-carved tub on a cold December night is one way I see paradise. We had hoped there’d be snow—it had snowed in Yunokami two days before our arrival—but neither of us was disappointed. Between dinner and the hot spring, with my husband beside me, I was in a peak Japan experience.
The owner of the inn, or perhaps her son, had made up our room while Hiro and I bathed. The futon were dreamily inviting, warm, and soft. Come morning, we went down to another feast. Breakfast included nattō, fermented soybeans that I usually turn my nose up. How could I disappoint my hosts, I thought, and Hiro watched in amazement as I stirred them and poured them over my bowl of rice to eat. When I first arrived in Japan in 1988, I had promised to eat anything on offer and only ask what it was after. Nattō was one of two food items (the other was shiokara, pickled squid reproductive organs, a shade of pink that recalled Pepto-Bismol,) I turned down on sight without knowing what they were. Nattō, being fermented, smells strongly of decaying funk. What was worse for me was the visual aspect. During the fermentation, the busy bacteria—Bacillus subtilis v. natto—produce a type of slimy webbing among the beans. To my unknowing eyes, the result looked like nasal mucus—snot. None of my cross-cultural preparedness and curiosity could get me past that visual until that morning in the inn.
One of the reasons I ate (and enjoyed!) the nattō was my powerful desire to avoid appearing rude. The inn’s owner and her son had been so kind to us, and I didn’t want to be the foreigner who turned up his nose at the carefully prepared repast. And maybe it was the glow of Christmas, spending time with someone I loved, love, and will continue loving, in a country I loved, love, and will continue loving. Everything about that 2016 trip was love. Love for and from our friends. Love for the places we managed to visit—two different hot spring resorts and four other hot spring baths, Miyajima, Kōchi (our first visit to Shikoku), the samurai school in Fukushima, the place in Tōkyō where Hiro and I had had our first date, the shrine in Kōbe where I had, before that first date, prayed for love, and our long, happy visit with Mr. Tsunoda—and love for the food we ate along the way.
What does Christmas of 2024 look like? One of my tires just blew out, so visiting a garage was an unexpected part of our holiday. I will find time to bake some cookies, spend Christmas Eve with friends, get on FaceTime with family back East, and let Hiro cook our Christmas dinner.
May whichever holiday you celebrate (or celebrated) bring you warmth, peace, and joy.
And a reminder, if I may, that your crowdfunding donation will be very appreciated!