We attended the 18th annual Mochi Tsuki (making mochi), a sweet, sticky rice cake, at Bainbridge Island's IslandWood, an environmental learning center. For more than 1,000 years, it has been customary for Japanese families to celebrate the New Year by making mochi for good luck, prosperity and health.

Rice was first steamed in wooden boxes over a fire. The rice was then transferred into a granite bowl. Three people raised wooden mallets over their shoulders, rhythmically striking it, beating the rice into a doughy mass. The danger level elevated as one person pounded while another flipped and moistened the rice between hits, getting ever so close to that person's hands. The sticky mass was then shaped into an oval around sweetened red bean paste and eaten.

Later we were treated to a performance of the Japanese drumming art form of Taiko. In attendance was a Japanese American woman who lived through being forced onto one of the WWII internment camps.