February 3: Setsubun

Oh Setsubun.  I was SO excited for you for weeks and weeks and then Groundhog Day happened and the emotional anti-climax was almost too much to bear.  Don't get me wrong - Justin and I rocked this holiday.  Unfortunately, we rocked it the way most parents rock their third child, in that we loved it, but didn't bother to take any pictures of it along the way.

It was mostly the Monday-ness of it.  Thankfully for us, lest we would've skipped it all together, we'd had a long talk with BFF Hop about the meanings and traditions of the holiday a couple days before so we were ready to go when the holiday hit.  We gathered beans, drinks and notes from BFF Hop and great ready to go when I got home from work.

Setsubun, not unlike Joma Shinji, is a holiday where (almost) everything you do has real tradition and meaning.  For example, we started off the night by Justin chasing me out of the house and throwing edamame at me while I made the scariest face I could and he shouted "Demons out!  Luck in!".  Why would he be calling me a demon, you ask?  I mean... we haven't been married that long, right?  No, no, children - there is no trouble in paradise.  See - it was his job to chase out the demons from our home in a sort of spiritual spring cleaning.  But since the bastards don't, like, materialize and pack up their shit themselves... we need to reenact him tossing them out in the form of me running away and making silly faces.

Then he slammed the door to complete the process of scaring out the demons.  Unrelated to the holiday, it also kicked off the process of convincing our neighbors that we're insane as well. I'm just saying - let's look at this from their POV.  A man just yelled "Demons Out" and slammed the door behind his wife... who then laughed and reopened the door and walked back in the house.  Was it a fight?  Did he just call her a demon?  Are they drunk?  No... no I'm pretty sure they're just lunatics, honey.

So... what next kids?  Well, remember how I said "almost" everything about the holiday has symbolism?  Well, I asked BFF Hop what else we should do besides the bean throwing and he explained that people tend to go out and get drunk.  Oh?  So... is that a cleansing activity?  You know, like, a symbolic disinfecting of the system in advance of summer?  Nope.  Drinking is fun.  That's pretty much the reason why.  So, we got reasonably tipsy for a work night.  I KNOW.  WE'RE LOSERS.  WHATEVER.  My two glasses of wine were DELICIOUS.  So there.

There definitely were other traditions, but like I said - we got a case of the Mondays.  We laughed like morons after Justin chased me out of the house and relaxed with the wine while we watched TV and settled in for the night.  It was incredibly pleasant and relaxing.  I would highly recommend doing a little light, crowd-source-researched reading on Setsubun because it is a super neat holiday.  There is a lot of emphasis on cycles, seasons and years in Japanese culture and that makes for some very cool traditions that are somewhat out of the norm for the west.  The best part of this holiday was the learning - by far.