New Years 2013

For Christmas, Brandon and I always get the kids Pj's for Christmas eve, but this year with Reagan being sick, they didn't get a chance to wear them until about a week later.  They got

the hats from Santa. It was a mess trying to get Brock to sit still with the hat on his head.

The tradition for the Japanese is to visit Shrines/temples at the beginning of the year.  They usually give a donation and try to start the year off with a clean slate.  We decided to go to Futemna Shrine to see how it worked.   Below is the line to get to the shrine.  It stretched a couple of blocks long, but moved quickly, so we were probably only in line 15 minutes or so.  Plus, along the way were little booths with cotton candy, games and other food.  

 This is the entrance to the shrine.  We had to queue up and then go up a few steps into another group, from there we got to go up the steps to make our donation.  It moved quickly and Reagan and I were on our way.  

 Brandon and Brock decided to wait for us since it was sort of crowded up there .

You go up to the open windows and throw in some money.  I don't think you are supposed to take pictures of the inside of the shrines.

 I had read about a booth selling fortunes and drug the family around until we found it.  Brandon humors me on a lot of these kind of things.   He didn't want his own fortune though, but we bought him one anyway.  Mine turned out the best and Reagan's was the least favorable, but it still wasn't bad.  It said her year was going to be "fairly good"  Mine was excellent and Brandon and Brock were Pretty good.  

 If you don't like your fortune,  you can tie it onto the line and it is supposed to blow away in the wind (not literally)  We decided that we would keep our fortunes.