It's Christmas Eve night for most of you, and Christmas morning for me. Hope you guys are having a good one! Don't worry,I'm not hiding from my family this morning (not yet, anyway)—I am writing this in the afternoon on the 23rd. Ah but with the magic of internet scheduling, it can go up now!

If any of you are also avoiding your families and are on Hive to look right now, I thought we'd talk about some of what you might find if you visit Japan during this season.

Christmas in Japan

Christmas is celebrated in Japan, but it is a bit different from the West. It's more secular, for starters, as there are few Christians in Japan. We do have some, but the percentage is quite low. At any rate, it is not a public holiday and working on the day is normal (on years where it doesn't fall on a Sunday, anyway).

Christmas Eve is considered a prime date night, the most romantic day of the year, and also a great time to confess your feelings to your crush. It's not uncommon to see a drama use a snowy Christmas eve night as the setting for a romantic confession. I'm sure many anime follow the same format. Many J-pop Christmas songs, in fact, sing of this: romance on Christmas Eve night. Love hotels do lots of business on this day. Restaurants are also packed with couples celebrating the special day. I don't really use Instagram that much these days, but it's very popular in Japan and I imagine you will find tons of date night food shots around now.

These days Santa also comes to Japan and many kids will be looking forward to their presents. I don't know if they do naught/nice lists here and try to scare their kids into behaving like a lot of folks do in the States, but a lot of kids do write letters to Santa with their wish lists. At my youngest son's preschool the other day they all wrote letters to Santa, in fact. I've heard from some parents who try to fight this trend of giving Christmas presents because kids also get money for New Years^[1] but such efforts may be doomed to failure. Society seems to be pushing in the direction of Santa. He's everywhere: at all the stores, visiting the preschools, at Xmas events around the city. So the kids are all primed for getting their Christmas presents on the big day.

There is also Christmas Cake (クリスマスケーキ): a special decorated cake for the holiday. It is usually covered with strawberries, which are special bred to be ripe and red just in time for this season (or so I am told). These things are everywhere. People really go nuts over them. I mean it is everywhere, even at convenience stores. There is even an emoji for it! 🍰 (Oh you might have thought that was normal shortcake when flipping through your emoji list, but nope, it's the special one for the special day.) The cake became popular during the post war years. It represented a luxury item at a time when most people had very little.

Japan has a thing for German pastries, so you will also find Stollen at the stores. I don't think many people try to make this one themselves, but it's pretty popular to buy. You will also see Baumkuchen around and about, but you find that year-round; Stollen seems to be the one that I only see around Christmas.

Ah, and there is the famous Christmas Chicken! This tradition was started by KFC in 1974 with their クリスマスには、ケンタッキー！ ("Kentucky for Christmas!^[2]") campaign which was incredibly successful. The story goes thus: Around 1973 an American went into a local KFC on Christmas and ordered a bucket of chicken, remarking as he left that it was the next best thing to turkey, which was unavailable in Japan at the time. The manager of this store passed the story onto his boss and it eventually made its way to the corporate office where they decided to make the Christmas Chicken campaign the next year, playing towards the Japanese love of holiday themed foods. That story always sounds a little too neat and tidy to me, but it's the official one. Whatever the case may be, since that event Christmas Chicken has been a very popular food for Christmas ever since.

KFC continues the Christmas Chicken every year. It's easy to see why—they make a heck of a lot of money from the event. Other places have joined in and you can find Christmas Chicken everywhere. Last year I even spotted a stall inside the train station that was selling it to a long long line of people, probably office workers picking it up before going home to impress their family.

Christmas Chicken is probably the most famous "strange" offering in Japan. Strange to foreigners, that is, but perfectly normal here. But other fast food places have also try to get in on the action. Pizza Hut, Pizza-La, and Domino’s all have Christmas specials involving a limited Christmas topping. All these deals must be popular because they seem to grow a little every year.

Speaking of limited Christmas things, one more thing that you might see is Christmas Beer. All the various makers will put out a limited Christmas flavor. This by itself isn't all that unusual. Limited edition beers that come for a few weeks and then disappear forever are fairly popular here. But these are special Christmas limited editions! That makes it double special.

And there we go. There might be one of two other things that pop up (I saw some red Christmas Sushi at the store earlier), but those are the biggies: date night, Santa-san, Christmas Chicken, Christmas Cake, and maybe some Christmas beer as well.

The real holiday of the season is New Years, so Christmas is just considered a fun import. And fun it is. Just ask this guy:

(title graphic made by me from this and this photos, both licensed under the creative commons)

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David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku.

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1. It's called otoshidama. I'll talk about it more in a few days when I write about New Years. ↩

2. KFC is commonly known as "Kentucky" in Japan. ↩