Kabocha muffins

Clark’s International Night Thanksgiving Celebration –

We celebrated Thanksgiving a second time this year at the Clark’s International night December 5^th with many friends and students. We had a potluck style dinner and enjoyed many wonderful traditional American dishes including turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes,various pies as well as some new dishes like kabocha (Japanese pumpkin). This squash reminds me of sweet potatoes but even better. This may be my new favorite squash. I love it!

A great time was had by all  great time playing games, singing Christmas carols and hearing a brief message on the baby Jesus come to earth to save us. Mitsuki and Momo joined us for the celebration and stayed the night with our family. Always a fun time of laughter and games when they come for a visit.  

Decorating the Christmas tree

Friendly game of spoons

Christmas group photo

Reiko’s Birthday Puzzle Completed –

I told you about the great puzzle and frame Reiko gave Stephanie for her birthday recently. Here is a picture of them in Reiko’s bakery with the puzzle completed and framed. We really enjoy visiting her on our way to and from school and seeing her on Saturday when we buy bread from her bakery.

Completed  birthday puzzle from Reiko.

Roster Oven and Kabocha Muffins –

I am so grateful for this wonderful kitchen appliance and my newly found ability to bake! I usually bake a lot in the fall and did not realize how much I was missing the sweet smells of muffins, cookies and casseroles coming from my kitchen. I have been baking kabocha muffins, banana muffins and chicken, broccoli, rice casserole. I am one happy mama in my kitchen again with my roaster oven.

Who knew you could bake and roast in this wonderful portable oven.

The kabocha muffins are wonderful but take much more work than they would in the states. Pumpkin is outrageously expensive here and virtually impossible to find. Like $52.00 dollars for three cans if you try to buy it through the online Costco site. So, being determined to make pumpkin muffins, I bought a whole kabocha from Costco for 298 yen or roughly $3.00, cut, cleaned and baked my own in order to have kabocha puree to make muffins. They turned out great and though my family continues to encourage me to cook Japanese dishes, I think they were happy to see some familiar fall sweets in our kitchen again.

Kabocha - Japanese pumpkin

Much smaller and sweeter than our American pumpkin

Roasting to make puree for muffins

Banana holiday muffins

Update Regarding Stephanie’s biking injury –

Thank you so much for your prayers and e-mails of encouragement regarding Stephanie’s biking injury. She is now off her crutches and all stitches are out. She is walking slowly and we are still making weekly trips to the ER for followup care. Please continue to pray for no infection and a full recovery. She still has some discomfort and the injury sight is still healing slowly. We appreciate all your love, concern and prayers very much.

Stephanie won third price in the Bethany photo contest –

I wanted to share some fun and exciting news with you. Bethany International Ministries (BIM), our missionary sending organization in the states hosted a photo contest for missionaries abroad. They had three categories in the contest - people, scenery and ministry. Stephanie has been our photographer extraordinaire since arriving in Japan taking pictures of everyday things with a unique and fresh perspective. She has captured some amazing pictures and we submitted several to the BIM photo contest. The staff narrowed the entries down to a few in each category then staff, students and missionary families voted for their favorites.

Turns out Stephanie won third place in the scenery category for her photo "Forests of Japan". She will be receiving a $25 Amazon gift card for her third place prize. We are proud of her knack for taking everyday pictures and pointing out their amazing beauty. Congratulations Stephanie and thank you for pointing our the beauty around us every day!

Our Elf on the shelf Jane showed up -

Turns out Jane, our Elf on the shelf found us half way round the world and has been showing up in various places since December 11th. Well that is when we noticed her hiding in our little Christmas tree anyway. Since then she has helped her self to our Christmas cookie sprinkles and one half of a cherry candy cane. Alex is not thrilled to have her here and has threatened he will throw her out his window if she goes into his bedroom. 

Jane sampled our cookie sprinkles a couple of days ago

We had a couple of conversations that she knows our family would not tolerate the mischievous, naughty things we see other Elves doing at other people's houses. We guess that is why she has kept her misbehaving to a minimum at our house...

Many thanks for your faithful prayers and support. We are grateful to be here serving and investing in our community. May this season give us pause to remember the real reason we celebrate and what a gift we have been given in the birth of Jesus Christ.

God bless you all,

K. Chadduck