Different cultures around the world mark the winter holidays with a delightful range of seasonal traditions. Join us on a quick tour of some truly distinctive holiday customs.

First stop: Japan. The snow-white confection known as a Japanese Christmas cake is an important—and delicious—holiday custom in a country that doesn’t celebrate Christmas in the traditional sense. But among the secular festivities of Japan’s holiday season (including city streets festooned with Western-inspired holiday glitter and ads promoting gift-giving) their bakeries turn out frosted sponge cakes garnished with fresh fruit (usually strawberries), chocolates, and Santa Claus figurines.

The Christmas cake gained popularity as Japan rebuilt following the destruction of World War II. This Western-style desert symbolized luxury and the re-emergence of a prosperous middle class. Today, it’s one of the country’s most popular winter holiday traditions. In fact, scholars cite the sharing of Christmas cake as the centerpiece, and highlight, of Japan’s increasingly popular Christmas festivities.

Christmas cake is a type of fruitcake served at Christmas time in many countries. A Christmas cake may be light or dark, crumbly-moist to sticky-wet, spongy to heavy, leavened or unleavened, shaped round, square or oblong as whole cakes, cupcake, or petit fours, with marzipan, icing, glazing, dusting with icing sugar, or plain. If a Christmas cake is covered in icing, it is quite common for it to be decorated – models of houses, of fir trees or of Santa Claus may be in the array of decorations.

— Source: wiki/Christmas_cake