(Sing:) It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...

It has been snowing for a few days now, and it's perfect because Christmas is in three weeks. I was wondering if we were going to have a white Christmas over on this side of the world, or if it was just going to keep raining eternally. It seems like winter came overnight; one day it was rainy and I was still toting my umbrella, then the next day this Japanese countryside was turned into a snow-globe.
I just got home from a Christmas party and have Christmas songs running through my head. That, together with complete peace in your heart, is enough to make anybody satisfied. My church went to a community party at a ski hill and did a special Christmas 'program' - the poster that was distributed falsely advertised us as a 'concert'. Basically we sung carols, and did a candle service. I also sang and played one of my songs that I wrote less than a month ago. It was amazing to me because we were in a big concrete ski lodge with high ceilings and I was concerned about my little voice carrying...but I asked God for a supernatural mic, and wow, yeah, you could definately hear me. I just hope the 70-ish (non-Christian) people who were there heard not just another song, but a little bit of Jesus too.
Yesterday, after the ladies' Christmas tea at church, I went to my friends' (Japanese parents') house to decorate the Christmas tree and sleep over. It was a lot of fun; we laughed a lot, and I laughed inside a lot too. Christmas here is so different than at home, mostly because I'm not attached to any traditions here that I've grown so used to from a lifetime of Christmases. We decorated a small (but large by Japanese standards) Christmas tree with a string of lights, a string of gold star garland, and a small (not even grocery size) bag of tree ornaments...compared to the huge tree and 2 moving boxes full of ornaments at home. There were only about 4 different kinds of tree ornaments, including balls that I think look like cat play-toys, cotton ball fluffs and plastic red apples.
Christmas will definitely be different this year, but different in a good way. Because the only way I'm going home for Christmas is in my dreams, I will have to adopt where I am now as home, complete with their Kentucky Fried Chicken and Christmas cake. But with the way things are going now I will have no problem with adopting this country as home, because they are quickly adopting me.