2024 Feb Taylor Swift Challenge & Jan/Feb 30 Prompts

Traditional Japanese New Year treat - a set of tiered boxes filled with specially prepared foods. We get ours from a local restaurant that makes each dish from scratch, with many of the ingredients imported just for the new year set. Like with many Asian celebratory foods, each dish has a meaning. For example, red & white represent the Japanese flag (and red repels evil and white is for purity); the yellow of chestnuts are like gold - so financial prosperity in the new year; the shrimp, with its curved back like an old man and “whiskers”, is for a long life; and so on. (At some point, I’ll scrap the photos of the osechi my mom used make when it was hard to find ready made dishes. The paper tucked in the photo pocket has a complete list of all the dishes (36!!!) included in the tiers.