More late Christmas pictures

 This is the display by the door into our favorite cake shop. On New Years Day, we bought a set of discount materials from them for 10,000 yen (about US$100). It included two dinners at the chain's restaurant in the next town,  whole bunch of special discount coupons, and a discount on anything else that you buy during the year.

 I think I posted this before but here it is again if I did. All over Japan this year, they have solved the problem of whether it is Merry Christmas or Happy Christmas by writing Happy Merry Christmas. I think that Merry Christmas is a treated like a single English word and doubling up meanings is not a problem in Japanese.

This is a new coffee maker. They seem to be one of those things that sell well but few people actually use after they buy them. You have to keep buying the little cartridges of coffee. There are three in the bottom left corner of the picture. The reason I put this here, though, is not the machine but look at the cups of coffee. Both of them have a head on them so that they look like a glass of beer. Somehow the Japanese have gotten the idea that to be good a cup of coffee has to have a large head of foam. I really dislike it and will not use a coffee shop if I know that they put heads on their coffee.