Guess What You're Getting for Christmas This Year

Back in the dog days of August, I dragged myself up seventy-four concrete steps to Kanako's house on Edwina Hill. Our husbands had both been deployed for two months by then, Weather Explorer had deserted me a few weeks earlier, and College Boy had been glued to his computer since early June. Reading aloud to the cats was my only remaining verbal outlet but lately they were more enamored with cicadas than the sound of my voice. I value my alone time but enough was enough. I was overdue for some human interaction.

Although my lungs started giving out somewhere between step 56 and step 57, I continued to inch my way upward like a cartoon character crawling across a desert. The thought that Tomoki -- one of the most adorable four-year olds on this side of the world -- was waiting to show me his toys motivated me. That, and sheer nosiness. I wondered how a young Japanese woman married to an American military officer decorated a house with the same floorplan as mine.

We spent a lovely afternoon playing with Tomoki, looking at Kanako's wedding pictures, luring two-year old Momoko out of the closet she hid in when she woke from her nap and spotted a scary gaijin in her dining room, and sipping tea and taking little (for me) bites of a scrumptious cake Kanako purchased especially for the occasion.

Kanako pointed out a a stool she had made by covering a large tea box with fabric in a class she took at the base community center. Not all that long ago, maybe a decade, you could walk into any house in the United States and know within a minute that they were a military family once stationed in Japan by their hibachi coffee table, their step tansu, and their fabric-covered tea box. We've already given away the coffee table we bought the first time we lived here, we're still half-heartedly searching for the perfect tansu since we need more furniture like a hole in the head, and Watanabe-san presented us with a small tea box last Christmas Eve covered in bunny-patterned fabric to commemorate the Year of the Rabbit.

Watanabe-san's Tea Box

Kanako asked if I would like to take the tea box class with her. She said the sensei had heard of my fondness for fabric and wished to meet me.

Well, gee, those tea boxes make nice containers and right about now I could use some new hiding places for all the yarn and fabric that keeps knocking on my door.  What the heck, I'll give it a whirl.  Surely it can't be any harder than piecing together a quilt square, right?  After all, Kanako has done it once and is game to do it again.  And it turns out Artistic and Fearless want to try their hands at this craft as well.  With the sensei on my right and Artistic on my left, I might be able to pull this off.

E-mails have been flying back and forth between sensei and her pupils for two weeks. What size tea box did we wish to cover? Hmm. What are our options?  5, 10, and 20 kilograms. Um, what is a kilogram? How much fabric do we need to buy? Can we use kimono fabric?

It dawned on sensei that we might require a little more guidance than her average pupil. She offered to accompany us to the fabric store on her day off work. Considering each of us is paying a measly fifteen hundred yen to take the class (about $20 as of an hour ago but it might be $25 by tomorrow morning the way the exchange rates are moving these days), the trip to the fabric store was certainly "above and beyond."

I opted for Year of the Dragon fabric, Artistic favored chrysanthemums, and Fearless deliberated at such length before choosing a tastefully conservative cranberry print that I had time to narrow down fabric choices for my next six tea boxes. Assuming I master covering the first one, of course, but I am an eternal optimist.

Fearless prepares to pay for her supplies

Oh, and in case you're wondering how a young Japanese woman married to an American military officer decorates a house with the same floorplan as mine: with about a third as much Japanese furniture as an American-born military spouse.