Sant Claus is coming to home.

On Christmas Eve, we went to Mitsuwa to buy eggs for the baking I was doing for Christmas and pick up a cake from Italian Tomato/Saint Honore for Christmas Eve dinner. (It was Jon's idea to pick up a cake--I wanted to make chocolate pudding, but in the end, buying dessert really freed up some of my time to concentrate on the Christmas baking.)

Mitsuwa was really pushing the chestnut, chocolate, and vanilla-strawberry shortcake flavor cakes, but I wanted something fun and not too sweet so we went with the green tea cake. The sugar Santa and bodiless snowman was really cute too--especially compared to the weird things they had on the other cakes.



It came in a festive box too. Sant Claus is coming to home.



I thought Pam once wrote about Christmas cakes being a derogatory term in Japan in her blog, but I guess I was mistaken. Anyway, this was fun to read again too.

Ah...Christmas cakes:

Christmas Cake

In Japan, age counts. Especially if you are a woman. The ideal of feminine beauty in Japan is youth and innocence. Plus, there's a lot of pressure on women to get married. So, if you're an unmarried woman, and heading towards thirty, we'd say that you're being "left on the shelf" or maybe "past your sell-by date".

In Japan though, they compare such women to a "Christmas Cake." It may well be sweet and delicious, but no one really wants any after the 25th. So, if you're an unmarried Japanese woman, after the age of twenty five, you're in extreme danger of becoming a Christmas Cake.