Kinda like transistorized turkey! (OMG that's an out-of-date reference... "What's a transistor, grampa?")

Tastes like possum.

I heard they created the market by claiming that fried chicken was the traditional dinner for Americans on Christmas.

That's brilliant. I heard a story on NPR about some Samoan island that does the same thing... they get a bucket of KFC chicken on Xmas because they think we do it in the States.

That is some slick marketing right there. The fact that it's completely false makes it more hilarious, in a way.

It's not because people think it's done in the States. There is no tradition of Christmas here.

Lots of people buy KFC on Christmas because they offer a special deal on buckets of chicken pieces that they usually don't sell. And they tend to be kinda pricey here as far as fast food goes.

Sorry to spoil the whole "aren't those yellow people funny and gullible" thing, but the reality is much more mundane.

It tastes like possum here, too.

Eeps, sorry if my comment came across as racist. Didn't mean it that way at all. Crazy corporate marketing campaigns are what is funny, not their targets.

The notion of KFC being expensive anywhere does not compute for me.

That's not a Japanese tradition, that's a tradition started by my Grandpa Spike, from Presque Isle, Maine. Yes indeed, my grandfather was named Spike.

Grandma Bertha (hand to God, that was my grandmother's name), was not a great cook. It was clear from her younger photos that sweet Bertha was not married with an eye for her kitchen cooking. Indeed, the woman used to cook a massive turkey two days in advance and let it sit in the 'mudroom' or small entry way from outside door to door that lead to the living room. Since the mudroom always stayed a balmy 20 or so degrees, it never seemed to harm the meal... much.

If any of you know northern Maine, they're hardy people who survive with an expected snowfall of 3 meters, which normally just piles ontop of itself up until the holiday season. So by the time my father piled two kids and a strange creature known as the "Jewish wife" in the car for the 8 odd hours of driving north for the holidays, there would be somewhere of the vicinity of 5 or 6 feet of snow on the ground all along the roads, byways, country lanes and walkways as far as the eye could see.

Presque Isle, Maine isn't exactly known as a bustling city. It's a postage stamp that barely registers with the rest of New England. It's mostly potato farmhouses and horses, huge expanses of nature and if you are here, you're either lost or family. If you are here on purpose, pretty much everyone is either related to you in some way or knows your business enough to be family. Strange as it may seem to the rest of us, one of the sole surviving and indeed thriving restaraunts in the one-block downtown walk is Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Grandfather Spike didn't ask a lot from Grandmother Bertha, as is obvious from their separate bedrooms even though he fathered three children of his own and sat comfortable in his spotless house. He liked Lawrence Welk on his amazingly large 20 inch television when he came home from running his own hardware store and normally asked no more than that. However, come the holidays, he always insisted on purchasing on Christmas Eve two large family style buckets from KFC every year, "For the grandkids."

I always remember that as the biggest thing about Spike and how Bertha would never begret him this treat. We'd go to midnight mass and then eat some of the enormous amounts of KFC leftovers before Santa came. The next day of course, the family would somehow enjoy Grandma Bertha's aged turkey creation while Spike would ... consciously, with an eye towards not wasting food of course, eat what was left of the Kentucky Fried Chicken baskets and meal.

As a kid, this would never strike me as odd, but as an adult now I know better. My grandparents passed away when I was very young, and against conceptual tradition I am a far better cook than my grandmother, but it never ceases to make me laugh when we pick up a bucket for the holidays of KFC.

It's not because people think it's done in the States. There is no tradition of Christmas here.

Lots of people buy KFC on Christmas because they offer a special deal on buckets of chicken pieces that they usually don't sell. And they tend to be kinda pricey here as far as fast food goes.

Sorry to spoil the whole "aren't those yellow people funny and gullible" thing, but the reality is much more mundane.

This is the way I first heard it, probably 20 or 25 years ago: As a result of KFC's brilliant advertising campaign, most Japanese now believe that Westerners celebrate Christmas with a chicken dinner instead of the more common ham or turkey.

This writeup says it goes back a full 35 years. Of course, maybe we Americans are the gullible ones, believing that the Japanese are hoodwinked into thinking chicken is what we eat on Christmas.

I suspect the truth is somewhere in between; maybe KFC stressed that Americans generally eat poultry on Christmas and, as the previous link states, cooking a whole turkey would seem a little absurd to Japanese, so chicken was just more appropriate.