That doesn’t matter how much of a Christmas lover you are. I bet that you are still going to be awed by this list of unusual customs. Chances are that you may have heard of a tradition from this list, but perhaps only if you are a native of the country where it is observed. The one thing all the areas of the world have in common is that the winter holidays are an exciting time. Even the countries which don’t have a Christian majority still observe these holidays in some way or another, whether they call it Christmas or not, in the end, it is all about remembrance of the ancestors, family, community, hearth, and warmth              

Eating at KFC in japan

Most of us associate Christmas food with the pleasure of a home-cooked meal such as the one prepared by our parents on grandparents. Even when we are not exactly eating traditional food for Christmas that we are still aiming at enjoying a hand cooked feast. Some of the regions favor a scrumptious roast and a few sides. Regardless of the performance for the main course, almost every country has some variation of the Christmas cookies we all crave come December.  

Still, most of us would never dream of junk food being the top choice for the Christmas meal, right? Enter Japan. The popularity of KFC as a Western food rose steadily here, but it always spikes around Christmas. In 2016, an estimated 3.6 billion Japanese people celebrated Christmas with Colonel Sanders’ food. This is so surprising from an outsider’s perspective especially because Japanese home cooking is so amazing, and definitely better than fast food.  

Krampus in Australia

Santa isn’t always about the gifts and goodies. We may have all heard the warnings of parents and grandparents in our childhood, saying that if we are not good, Santa won’t bring us a good present. But for Austrian children, the downside of being a bad maybe even worse than Santa’s diminished attention. They just might attract the wrath of Krampus.   

Krampus is just a mythical half-beast half-man figure which can be summed up as a bad Santa. He comes to punish naughty children by taking away their existing toys or even swatting them with the birch branches. He carries. He is one of the traditional companions of St Nicholas, but he definitely represents the stick from the old carrot and sticks playing.

The Pickle ornaments in Germany 

The past centuries natured a strong Christmas tradition in Germany, leading to the country’s wonderful variety of wooden toys, gloriously detailed nativity scenes and numerous kinds of winter cookies and confections. One stranger element of all this, however, is the Christmas pickle, if you have ever seen one of those hung from a branch of a Christmas tree and wondered what’s that all about, here’s the scoop.

In traditional German celebrations, a pickle was hidden among the ornaments adorning the tree. After the grown-ups revealed the holiday tree to the children, they would set off on a race to see who finds the pickle first. The winner would get an extra small present, or the chance to open his or her presents first.  

In time the actual pickle was replaced by a wooden pickle, sometimes painted in green. Some of the early German settlers brought it to the U.S, where people continued using this strange ornaments. Even if its meaning was lost. Still not even in Germany was custom very widespread, so it’s understandable why the pickle became somewhat of a mystery.

Zwarte Piet in the Netherlands

This controversial tradition has been undergoing some transformation in the modern age. In an effort to eliminate its racist undertones. The original story goes like this on Christmas eve, Sinterklass arrives in style on a steamship, accompanied by his slave Zwarte piet. The parallels with slave ownership are made even more harrowing by the ship in which they arrive. 

Black peter is meant to be the white Santa’s helper. But he is also a boogeyman for dutch kids. There were traditionally told that Zwarte Piet will take them with him if they misbehave since people started being concerned by racism, that would to concerned with downplaying this tradition by making Zwarte Piet out to be a chimney sweeper instead of a slave