28 October, 2010

Christmas is...the smell of kerosene

If you consider that wearing jackets, using the heater and having freezing hands when outside is winter, then it has arrived in Tokyo, only a month after summer left.

We got our heater out yesterday.

Here is a photo of our hard-working kerosene heater (or stove, as they are called here in Japan). When it starts or finishes it emits a small cloud of kerosene. When one of our boys smelt that this morning his response was, "It smells like Christmas!"

Wow, what an association!

In the past we've smelt that smell a lot, possibly more than others who don't have rowdy boys. The heater has an inbuilt earthquake safety feature. This heater stood to the side of the narrow walkway between our dining/kitchen and tiny lounge room for the last four winters. Do you know how to simulate an earthquake? Run into the heater and it will think there is an earthquake and immediately shut the heater off emitting a cloud of kerosene...you get the picture! Then you have to re-start the thing, which produces more fumes. 

And when Christmas here is in the middle of winter and three weeks holidays from school, you can imagine that there was heaps of "earthquakes" in our house around that time. No wonder the kerosene smell reminds our son of Christmas.

2 comments:

Ken Rolph said...

The smell of rubber always reminds me of Christmas. When I was young we always got swimming gear for Chistmas -- masks, goggles and flippers, thongs or boogie boards. They were wrapped so you couldn't see what they were. But it was always so hot the small gave them away.

We used to leave on Boxing Day for our weekender down the coast and not come back till Australia Day. It gave me just enough time to get a haircut before school started again. We usually managed to wear out our swimming gear during a season, so always needed a replacement.

Wendy said...

I know what you mean, Ken. Probably the smell of sunscreen does it for me. And the sound would be cricket TV commentary. That makes it tricky to get into the spirit here in Japan!