Christmas Coffee & Tea

Tis the season for holiday parties! On Tuesday night we had our squadron holiday coffee. Since the guys in the other squadron are deployed we invited all of the ladies in the 13th to come celebrate with us. Our commander and DO's wives hosted the event and decorated the house beautifully! Everywhere we turned there were shimmery lights, festive decorations and delicious food!

Jenn and Becky - our lovely hostesses!

As a party favor/Christmas gift, they had a crystal ornament made that has our Lady Samurai logo etched on the front. I'm generally not a big fan of party favors and rarely end up keeping them, but these are so beautiful and I will truly treasure mine!

Part of the evening's business was saying farewell to two wives who will be moving away before our next coffee in January. =^( One of them is Sarah Cross (pictured below on the left). She was the one who first invited me and James to the Bible Study we attend on Sunday nights and will be greatly missed!

It was a great night with so many friends in one small space! I took pictures of many of them and finally remembered to jump in one myself.

After dinner and the farewells were over, we did a combat gift exchange (similar to White Elephant except we all got nice presents instead of silly gag gifts.) In fact, many of them were so nice that people were playing pretty ruthlessly in order to walk away with the one they wanted. I brought some lotions and other good-smelling items made with pure New Zealand honey, and was proud that people kept stealing that one from each other. The gifts I unwrapped also got stolen several times, but I finally went home with a beautiful calendar with pictures from all around Japan and a $15 iTunes gift card. Not bad!

Below is the whole group of lovely ladies! I love them all!

This morning was our MOSC Christmas Tea at the officer's club. We dressed in our best 50's dresses, pearls and gloves and shared tea sandwiches and scones with our Japanese neighbors. We also did an activity where we were given some loose, festive materials and had to construct a Christmas ornament using all of it. My friend Mary was sitting next to me and just returned from spending Thanksgiving at Tokyo Disneyland, so we made a Mickey Mouse-inspired ornament.

After that we did a gift exchange with the Japanese ladies at our table. I ended up with one of the gifts they brought and was excited to see that she had packaged up several decorations commemorating the Japanese new year. I guess this next year is the year of the rabbit so there were several rabbit figurines, as well as a beautiful, miniature gold screen with kanji symbols on it. The red and gold will match my Christmas decor very nicely.

I mostly spent the day taking pictures with another lady's camera. She's the official MOSC "historian" and it's her job to take pictures of events like this. But she had some other duties to perform during the party so she asked me to take pictures for her. I had fun doing that, but realized at the last minute that I wasn't going to get to keep any of the pictures I was taking! So I made sure to get a couple with my little point-and-shoot before the party was over. It's always fun getting dressed up and celebrating with friends!