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.