It's soooooo cold!!!
These days I need to warm the living room before I get up.

But today is extremely cold.
The first snowfall news on TV makes me feel colder!!!!

I cooked "nanakusa-gayu (rice porrige with seven herbs)" by myself for the first time in my life.
I had it at the thirty year's interval.
I remember that my mother cooked it to us when I was an elementary school student, but I didn't like the taste so much at that time, and she quit cooking it ever since.
　
I studied how to cook nanakusa-gayu beforehand, and learned that we boiled rice with "dashi (fish or seaweed broth)" and added the herbs a little before the rice porrige was done.
The web site I studied from said it was also important to pour boiled water to them to make them less bitter.

I enjoyed it with my husband for dinner, and thought my mother didn't seem to boil rice without dashi.

「七草粥」・・・また即英語出ませんでした。
「おかゆ」だけなら行けるんだけど・・・英語圏ではオートミールのおかゆも存在するからねぇ（私は箱の説明通りに作って試したが、ギヴアップだった）、"rice" porrigeと、「お米の」が要る。

メモメモ。

我が家では誰も好んで食べない、七草粥。
母も作るのをすっかりあきらめています。
でも、「日本文化実践」のために、今年は作りました。
本来なら1月7日午前のうちにいただくようです。・・・が、炊き方調べるうちに午後になり、結局夕食に私と夫とでいただきました。

"Kakizome" is so hard to translate into English.
The suffix "-zome" means the first work or performance of the year, so we Japanese call the first calligraphy of the year "kakizome", which is usually done on January 2.

Kakizome work is one of the main winter holiday assignments for elementary school students and junior high students in Japan, but it is originally a calligraphy showing the motto or resolution of the writer.

This year, I did kakizome for myself for the first time in my life.
I've come to like calligraphy more, for I felt calligraphy was a very handy Japanesque hobby.

Happy New Year!!
I resolve here that I'll write over 100 entries in English an year.
So I start the first entry of this year in English.

This year, I promise that I'll learn more about traditional custom in Japan, that means I'm writing more about seasonal events and try to introduce them in English.

Today I learned how to take care of "kami-dana (a household alter)".
We clean the alter two days before New Year's Day at the latest, which is ideal to start cleaning it two week before New Year's day and serve new rice, salt, water, two bottles of omiki (sacred sake) and new sakaki (a kind of japonica) branchs.

We change rice, salt, water in the pitcher every day.
We change sakaki vase waters too.
About omiki bottles, it is said we change sake in the bottles twice a month, usually on the first day and the fifteenth day of each month.
It's also important to keep sakakis lively.

During New Year holidays, we also serve zouni at the alter.
I have lots of things to learn how to take care of it well.