Cultural Night Tradition- Mormon Pioneer Heritage

July 24th is the anniversary of the Mormon Pioneers crossing into the Salt Lake Valley.  In Utah this is a state holiday and there is a huge parade and fireworks.  As we get further and further from Utah, I feared that my kids would not know of their Pioneer ancestry and heritage so our cultural night tradition was the perfect way to re-introduce this.  Here is what we did for the night:

Guests: Benham family

Food: Velvet Chicken Soup, Hashbrowns, corn, Sweedish Jam cake

https://www.lds.org/ensign/1972/07/a-melting-pot-of-pioneer-recipes?lang=eng&_r=1

Music: Mormon Tabernacle Choir Hymns

Geography: Map of the journey to the Utah Valley

Animals: Google search of High Desert animals

Architecture: Famous Utah Buildings; State Capitol, Salt Lake City Temple, old Pioneer homes, Joseph Smith Memorial Building, the Lion House

Heritage Tale: The Miracle of the Crickets

http://eom.byu.edu/index.php/Seagulls,_Miracle_of

Famous People: Discussion of Brigham Young, Porter Rockwell, our Pioneer ancestors 

Pioneer Games: We played hide and seek, duck duck goose, hopscotch

Pioneer Clothing: We talked about the practicality of good walking shoes, hats, and bandannas

 

A few things we love about Japan

We have now been in Misawa, Japan for a year and there are definitely some things that we love about it which are unique to Japan:

Drink machines on every corner, even in the middle of nowhere

Roller slides- sit on a mat and take a roll down the side of the mountain/hill

Plastic food displays.  These are great for deciding where to eat and for pointing out our selections to the servers since we do not speak or read Japanese

Japanese Baskin Robbins.  I grew up by Baskin Robbins so it is already nostalgic.  We have come to love Red Bean, Sakura, Apple, and Camo flavored ice cream.

We continue to enjoy exploring Japan with our monthly ITT Trips.  In July we went to the Tsuruta Town where we saw the Tsurunomai Bridge, a 300 m length bridge that is the longest wooden bridge in the triple arched stone design in Japan.

We saw some cranes at the bridge.  I have decided that a crane is my spirit animal and I love to collect images of them.

Shrines are tucked into small little corners all over Japan.

 We next went to the Takayama Inari Shrine.  It is similar to the Fushimi Inari Shrine in Kyoto and worships the Shinto God O-Inari-san, the fox who tends to a multitude of things.  We tried to spot all the images and statues of the foxes around the shrine.

It seemed as if these stairs went on forever.

There are not quite "1,000 Tori gates" but there were more than we were willing to count.

This image from above the gates is supposed to resemble a long red Chinese dragon.

I can never get over the beauty of the Japanese gardens

This is a memorial for American sailors who lost their lives when their boat wrecked off the coast of Tsugaru City in 1889.  It is called Cheseborough Memorial Stone

View of the Sea of Japan from the top of the memorial