[Note: I'm truly sorry about the poor quality of the photo on the right. You see, for one thing it was taken with my cell phone. For another, I was a bit rushed while taking it because several people were looking at me like I was some kind of dork who'd never seen Col. Sanders before. They're right about the dork part, but I actually knew who Col. Sanders was before I came to Japan...]Many people will try to tell you that there's no traditional Christmas meal in Japan, but I'm here to tell you that they are all damned liars. I know for a fact that every single person in Japan has Kentucky Fried Chicken on Christmas Eve. You see, they have no ovens in their houses with which to cook turkey. And turkeys are big, whereas pieces of the Colonel's secret recipe chicken are small, and the Japanese like small things (because they themselves are small). Furthermore, anyone caught not eating KFC on Christmas Eve is hauled out of his house and shot in the street for blaspheming the holy spirit of Christmas. You don't fuck around with the Japanese when it comes to holy days...
What's with the odd belt he's wearing? Is that an integral part of the Japanese Col. Sanders/Santa tradition?
ReplyDeleteJapanese Christmas looks like fun, and has me thinking that we in the west need to develop our own bastardized versions of Japanese holidays.
Hmm, I hadn't noticed the belt, so I'm not sure.
ReplyDeleteThey've got a boatload of different holidays over here, but nobody really does anything for most of them, except maybe New Year's and O-bon. Believe me, New Year's in the west is a lot more fun. O-bon has some potential as an import holiday, though (ghosts of dead relatives come back to town for a few days, etc.). There are a lot of non-holiday "official" days here. There's an official day in the summer for eating grilled eel, for example. Some of these might be worth checking out...
Well, we have those days of soda and pretzels and grilled eel. Not sure what the official dates are though.
ReplyDeleteBy the way -- no snow here at all yet.
There's a day in Canada for eating grilled eel??!! WTF?!
ReplyDeleteIn Mexico, we celebrate something similar to O-Bon: The Dead's Day ('Día de Muertos'), with sugar candy shapped as skulls, to get started. My favorite holiday? Spring ceremonies related to Cherry blossoms. They look great in anime.
ReplyDeleteOnce I had a "Japanese" Christmas in Bolivia with some local adding. Cocaine and fried chicken watching tv and feeling really weird.
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