Merry Belated Christmas and Happy New Year

So Christmas passed without any major disasters here, and I hope you had a nice holiday too. Christmas is always a bit of a bummer in Japan, I've found. Christmas is of course highly commercialized in Canada, but I always felt that, on some level, people were a little bit friendlier to each other, too. It always seemed that most people were taking the whole "goodwill towards men" thing to heart.
In Japan though, Christmas is a commercial nightmare of flashing lights and screaming hawkers in Santa hats, and there is none of the underlying gentleness or goodwill. I guess they don't know it, because they've never experienced it.
Back home, I feel like there was always a sense of decorum and an appreciation of Christmas as a time of peace. Music, for example, was at least somewhat tasteful (as I recall). Here (as I've mentioned before) you go shopping and you just hear Mariah Carey and some awful synth version of "Last Christmas" by Wham on repeat. You almost never hear any of the Christmas music that I like, which is of the more somber, old-school variety like "O Come All Ye Faithful" or "Good King Wenceslas" - the kind of music that highlights Christmas as a time of light in darkness, warmth in a world which can be literally and figuratively cold.
So anyway, Christmas was fine, but I've come to expect almost nothing from Christmas in Japan. The only way to avoid feeling depressed, I think, is to lower your expectations and treat Christmas as "just another day", basically. I did go to a friend's house though, and had dinner and drinks with a few people from work, so that was nice.
For New Year's, I am going to Nagoya for a few days. New Year's is a much bigger deal in Japan than Christmas, so maybe I will be able to get my fill of festive feeling in a few days' time!
Meanwhile, here's wishing you Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! All the best in 2012.