Prepare for the Japanese New Year Deity - Clean your House!
We Japanese have a big event after Christmas! It involves cleaning...lots of cleaning...for the New Year. Why do we clean this much? Who are we preparing for? Find out here!
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The most wonderful time of the year…
During the holiday season, your town probably turns into the most beautiful place in the world.
Christmas trees wearing beautiful ornaments, many happy people enjoying holiday shopping… everything is so beautiful and everybody is excited to get together with their family and friends.
The holiday season is a special time for celebrating health and happiness and also a time to get ready for the new year. In Japan, we do enjoy Christmastime, of course! However we Japanese have one more very important event before the new year. Did you know that?
Year-End Cleaning
What is year-end cleaning?
This is not just regular cleaning. We need to clean everything: clean up the dust from all over the house, wash the windows, wipe all over the floor with a damp cloth, etc. Anything and everything should be clean before having a new year. This is one good habit for keeping your place clean, however there is a special meaning for the Japanese tradition of year-end cleaning.
So many deities in Japan!
You may know that we Japanese have many deities. Of course we have a New Year deity too. We clean the house in order to have the New Year deity over at our house. It is believed that the New Year deity brings happiness, health and wealth to us. That‘s why it is essential for us to clean our house in preparation to have the deity visit.
Your country might not have this kind of custom, but cleaning your room is a good thing for everybody. So I will give you a couple of tips to clean your room used in Japan during the year-end cleaning.
Useful tricks for cleaning
Cleaning the windows
You don’t need to buy anything special; just prepare newspaper. Prepare a piece of damp newspaper. Only thing that you have to do is wipe windows with the damp newspaper. Newspapers have ink. That means it contains oil. While you wipe the window with it, the oil part of the newspaper will remove dirt from the windows. After use the damp newspaper, try one more time with dried one too. If you wipe the windows twice, I am sure that the windows will be very clean and shiny!
Carpet cleaning
It is quite difficult to keep your carpet clean. If you have babies and toddlers at your place, I am sure you have stains on your carpet! Don’t worry! You can use something you have in your kitchen to clean your carpet.
Baking soda is very good item for removing the stains on carpets. Sprinkle baking soda on your carpet, then vacuum it. You can remove not only the stains but also odor and dust. If the stains are very tough to remove, use a towel and rub the part using baking powder.
Please try it out! Your house will be the most beautiful place for the new year!
The information in this article is accurate at the time of publication.
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