it's no lie that the second child doesn't get the same kind of attention that the first child does. i almost forgot to do maya's 100th day celebration and we're doing her girls' day dinner a week late. poor thing. but at least we did it ...the 100th day marks baby's first consumption of food (kuizome). i looked it up online and got different reasons for doing this: to ensure the child grows up healthy and strong; to encourage eating at the right age (and something about growing healthy, hard teeth so a child can eat whatever he/she wants); to ensure the child never goes without food (to prevent famine in his/her lifetime); to get them accustomed to all kinds of flavors and to enjoy food. it's traditionally done on the 100th day after the birth, but depending on the region it can be the 120th day. of course, the baby doesn't actually eat the food. the parents pretend to feed them food that is considered lucky, like red snapper (tai)and red sticky rice (osekihan), using the baby's first set of plates and chopsticks (ohashi).
girls' day (hina-matsuri) is celebrated every march 3. families with daughters display special dolls called hina-ningyou or ohina-sama. a complete set of dolls is quite large so it's not feasible for many households in japan to own an entire set. instead, they usually own just the lord and lady (emperor and empress) dolls. my grandparents purchased an entire 7-tiered set for my first girls' day. when we moved to the u.s. the set was shipped over. when my sister and i were young my parents set it up every year. but it's been about 10 years since the dolls last saw the light of day.
for maya's first girls' day my mom set out the dolls and invited my in-laws for dinner to see the dolls and "feed" maya. we didn't have a chance to get maya a set of her own dishes, so she used plates from when i was a little girl. she seemed rather befuddled with the food near her mouth. (ian was my helper and held the plates of food.) then we took some family photos with the dolls. maya also received various new dolls from her grandparents and her great-grandparents. (ian got a hand-held sudoku game, which my dad promptly tested out.)
3 comments:
Oh my gosh! I never knew about girls day! I want girls day!
I absolutely loved reading about these 2 nifty celebrations. Awesome. If I had those dolls when I was little, I wouldn't have been able to tear myself away from them. How lovely!
You guys look so happy. Maya is a lucky little girl. Y'all have, like, culture. Honestly, sometimes it's truly boring being some kind of Irish-Scottish-Dutch-German Anglo mutt. No special celebrations of this sort.
p.s. Maya looks skeptical in that last picture. Heh.
p.p.s. Jordan! Your socks are so white! My poor family's socks are never this white. The boys wear them around the YARD, after they're done on the trampoline. Oh, and our icky, dust-bunny-laden floors. I suck at laundry.
in case anyone else doesn't know ... i neglected to mention that these are japanese traditions.
that picture is deceptive: JR's socks are actually NOT that white. in fact, they are usually quite gray, hole-y and stretched out! i suck at laundry too. ;)
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