New Years Cards

Not being one to send Xmas cards - well, it involves being organised and finding time and most people I know don't tend to send them and bla bla bla - I always wonder why people DO buy loads and hand them out to people they know. I mean sending to people you don't see all the time, fine, but it's such a commercial thing, isn't it? And the fact that it's so often done with a complaint because people feel they have to send them but don't want to, find it boring, bla bla bla.

Anyway, here New Years cards are the big thing rather than Xmas cards. And one of my students told me yesterday she'll be spending her Xmas holidays writing 600 of them. Well, glueing a signature and message into them. I taught her the word 'tedious' in exchange for this information and told her I didn't know 600 people. She said many were acquaintances of her husband and that a couple of years ago they'd had to send over 1,000 cards, so this wasn't so bad.

Yeah right. As I was discussing with another student, second marriages in Japan aren't as common as in, say, the UK. I imagine one reason could be that once you've done the get-up-at-5am-to-make-breakfasts-and-lunches thing and the New Years cards thing, once - that you have no desire to ever do it again. I am, of course, just theorising here.