A group of my dear female friends and I have a yearly holiday tradition: we gather together to construct, or rather, attempt to construct gingerbread houses (or other assorted things; last year there was a set gingerbread boobs), we watch Love Actually, and we share buckets of Popeye’s fried chicken. Yup, that’s right, fast food fried chicken. Well, as it turns out, fried chicken and Christmas have a connection in a place far away from the West Village apartment that hosts my annual gathering. A recent article in The Smithsonian focused on fried chicken’s centerpiece as a holiday tradition in Japan where apparently the lines for buckets of so-called “Christmas chicken” can stretch for city blocks. Chalk it up to the widespread success of ad campaign kicked off by KFC in 1974 that exclaimed Kurisumasu ni wa kentakkii! (translation: Kentucky for Christmas!). Now while we applaud the Japanese people’s fellow finger-licking love come holiday time, we’d like to offer up a suggestion for how to make it even better: Popeye’s for Christmas! In our humble opinion as far as fast food chicken goes, it’s vastly superior. No offense, Colonel. FIORELLA V.
