Thanksgiving and Christmas meals are usually home-cooked affairs, with several family members working for hours—days, even—preparing cherished favorites, and, on occasion, culinary experiments that have gone terribly and irrevocably awry.
Unless you’re in Japan, you’re probably not picking up a bucket of chicken and sides for Christmas, but in the hectic run-up to the commemoration of Christ’s birth, the Colonel can be a clutch player, feeding the squad when there’s no time or energy left to cook. It’s no surprise then that the fast-food chain has released holiday-themed buckets for decades. For 2020, KFC is dipping into that long-held tradition for two reissues and a new design strongly influenced by the ghosts of buckets past.
The commemorative buckets replicate the 1966 and 1971 U.S. editions. Every detail, down to the retired tagline, “North America’s Hospitality Dish,” on the ‘66 bucket gets recreated. Naturally, even the graphics and typography are representative of prevailing trends for each bucket. The 2020 heritage is an original design that leans hard into the land of nostalgia-a mash-up made up of previous holiday chicken buckets of Christmases past, even last year. Red, Green, and White dominate all three of the designs, and thankfully, no freshly-shaved colonel.
“KFC bucket meals have been bringing people together around the dinner table for more than 60 years,” said Andrea Zahumensky, KFC U.S. CMO, via press release. “Even though the holidays may look a little different this year, we hope our holiday buckets help everyone hark back to a simpler time and bring some comfort and joy to your homes and your families throughout the season.”
Holiday buckets will be available at U.S. KFC locations starting November 24th.
