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This is the second in a series of stories exploring the rich diversity of Christmastime edibles around the world, and the stories behind the food.

The Salt

About This Series: The 12 Days Of Quirky Christmas Foods Around The Globe

The Salt

Japan's Beloved Christmas Cake Isn't About Christmas At All

The winter holidays are a time of abundance, but for Christians in the Middle East, the official start of the Christmas season is marked by a decidedly rustic dish: porridge.

Archbishop Swerios Murad of the Syriac Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem says his congregation will eat boiled wheat kernels this week to mark the Feast of St. Barbara, or Eid el-Burbara in Arabic.

"It's is a simple porridge," Murad tells The Salt, "but it's very important that it be sweet."

St. Barbara was an early convert to Christianity in the town of Nicomedia, today Izmit in modern Turkey, Murad explains. She was the daughter of an over-protective father who built her a home in a tower to cloister her from the outside world. Yet, while her dad was traveling, Barbara converted to Christianity in secret. When her father found out, he tried to kill her.

Barbara fled her tower to the nearby hills. Murad says a shepherd tried to help her by keeping her hidden and feeding her simple porridge. But soldiers on patrol in the area found her and dragged her back to her father. Barbara's father had Barbara tortured and beaten, and when she refused to renounce Christianity, he cut off her head. In divine punishment, he was struck by lightning and died. Because of this lighting, Barbara became the patron saint of those who faced death by fire and later, artillery. Some folklorists have suggested that Barbara may have also helped inspire the Brothers Grimm's Rapunzel tale many centuries later.

Murad says his congregation serves a porridge of boiled wheat, called burbara, to remember the food the shepherds gave to the young convert – and to recall the lessons of Barbara's fate.

"She obeyed our God, and not her father, as the Bible told us," Murad says. "First of all we must obey the words of God, and after that we respect our parents."

The feast is celebrated on Dec. 17 according to the Julian calendar, which is followed by Orthodox Christians in the Holy Land, including about 700 families in Israel and the West Bank. This tiny Syriac sect traces its roots to the earliest days of Christianity. Syriac is a dialect of the ancient language Aramaic, and it is still used in liturgical services held in St. Mark's Church, tucked into an alleyway of Jerusalem's Old City.

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Palestinian Christian Issa Kassissieh, in a Santa Claus costume, rings his bell and wishes everyone a Merry Christmas in the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City, Dec. 22, 2013. Nir Alon/Demotix/Corbis hide caption

itoggle caption Nir Alon/Demotix/Corbis

Palestinian Christian Issa Kassissieh, in a Santa Claus costume, rings his bell and wishes everyone a Merry Christmas in the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City, Dec. 22, 2013.

Nir Alon/Demotix/Corbis

On Tuesday night Nadia Ishaq stirred a soup pot full of fresh burbara in her home in Jerusalem's Old City. She decorated the dish with ground chickpea flour, ground coconut heaped across the bowls in the shape of a cross, and candied fennel seeds scattered across the top. Ishaq says she and her neighbors mark the holiday by bringing bowls of their porridge to each other. Syriac Orthodox Christians will celebrate Christmas this year on Jan. 7.

In total, there are nearly 200,000 Christians in the Holy Land. Catholics in the Holy Land — and around the world — marked the holiday earlier this month, on Dec. 4, according to the Western church calendar. Bernard Sabella, a retired associate professor at Bethlehem University, says that in his Roman Catholic family, the porridge tradition actually had an air of luxury when he was growing up. Boiling the wheat kernels takes between two and three hours, and the pot sends a rich, cinnamon aroma throughout the house.

"Breakfast was usually a cup of tea with a piece of bread and that's it," he recalls. "And therefore, making burbara was something out of the ordinary for us kids at the time."

In Bethlehem, he says, families often cook more than two pounds of wheat for the holiday, well exceeding what the household can eat. Workers take portions of burbara to the office to share with Christian and Muslim colleagues alike. Often, the burbara pot lasts a full week. Along with eating porridge, Eid Al-Burbara is also the time when families put up the Christmas tree.

"It's a celebration of the season," Sabella says. "And for us, when we prepare and eat the burbara porridge, it's really preparing for Christmas."

While there's some doubt about whether St. Barbara actually existed as a historical figure, she is known and celebrated throughout the Christian world. She is the patron saint of the Italian navy. Santa Barbara, Calif., got its name because its founder, the Spanish explorer Sebastian Vizcaino, survived a storm just offshore on the eve of the St. Barbara feast day.

Archbishop Murad says that even though the Jerusalem Christmas season opens with porridge, the food of the holiday gets far richer, with chicken baked in sumac, colorful vegetable salads, and sumptuous meat.

"The first thing we think about on Christmas is lamb with rice," he says. "Most Christian families will have it."

Daniella Cheslow is a journalist based in Tel Aviv. She hosts a weekly radio show about food called The Tel Aviv Table.

Middle Eastern cooking

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Updated at 9:21 a.m. ET

Alan Gross, the American contractor who spent five years in Cuban detention, has been freed and is on his way back to the United States. A senior administration official said Gross was released on humanitarian grounds in exchange for three Cubans jailed in the U.S.

As we previously reported, Gross, a subcontractor for the U.S. Agency for International Development, had been working on a program to improve Internet access for Jewish Cubans.

He was covertly distributing laptops and mobile phones while traveling in Cuba on a tourist visa. He was arrested on Dec. 3, 2009. A Cuban court found him guilty of crimes against the state in 2011, and sentenced him to 15 years in prison.

In December 2013, Peter Wallsten of The Washington Post told NPR Gross was being detained in a 10-foot by 12-foot room, with two other prisoners.

This month, Gross' wife, Judy, said her husband had lost more than 100 pounds during his detention. "He can barely walk due to chronic pain, and he has lost five teeth and much of the sight in his right eye," she said in a statement.

In an interview in June with NPR, Judy Gross said her husband was "despondent and very hopeless." She warned that he had said he would "take drastic measures if he's not out very shortly."

Gross had staged a nine-day hunger strike earlier this year.

Alan Gross

Cuba

Only about 1 percent of the Japanese population is Christian. But you might not realize that if you visited a major metropolitan area during Christmas time. Just like in America, you'll find heads topped with red Santa hats everywhere and elaborate seasonal displays: train sets, mountain scenes and snow-covered trees. Often, these are set inside of bakeries hawking one of the highlights of the holiday season in Japan: Christmas cake.

About This Series

The Salt

The 12 Days Of Quirky Christmas Foods Around The Globe

"It's basically sold on practically every street corner," says anthropologist Michael Ashkenazi from the Bonn International Center for Conversion, who studied Japanese culture and tradition.

The dessert is a snow-white sponge cake, delicately covered with whipped cream and topped with perfectly shaped, ruby red strawberries. It's a beloved December-time treat on the island nation — and not just because it's delicious. In fact, Christmas cake is now a symbol of commercialism and prosperity, its story intertwined with Japan's rise from ruins after its defeat in World War II.

To understand why, we need to take a little historical detour.

After World War II, American soldiers led the work of rebuilding an occupied Japan. The Japanese economy was in shambles and food shortages were common. Even rarer were sugary sweets. The sweet treats from the U.S. that the Americans handed out were a memorable luxury to a people still recovering from the ravages of war.

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A man in a reindeer costume hawks Christmas cake outside a bakery in Kobe, Japan, Dec. 23, 2011. Buddhika Weerasinghe/Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Buddhika Weerasinghe/Getty Images

A man in a reindeer costume hawks Christmas cake outside a bakery in Kobe, Japan, Dec. 23, 2011.

Buddhika Weerasinghe/Getty Images

"Sweet chocolates, above all, given by American soldiers epitomized the utmost wealth Japanese children saw in American lives," cultural anthropologist Hideyo Konagaya wrote in a 2001 paper on the history of the Christmas cake published in the Journal of Popular Culture. Sweets created a longing for wealth and a desire to Americanize, he says.

But it wasn't just soldiers that came to Japan. Christian missionaries also made the journey, bringing gifts and the concept of Christmas to Japanese schools and families. Missionaries had actually introduced Christianity to Japan as early as the 16th century. But Christmas didn't catch on as a popular holiday until these post-war years, when the Japanese embraced a glitzy, commercial version of the holiday that was less about religion than about prosperity, explains Konagaya.

"The Christmas celebrations gave the Japanese the most tangible pictures that could convey images of prosperous modern lives in America," Konagaya writes.

And so Japan embraced the trappings of a picture-perfect, American-style Christmas — including Santa Claus, an ornament-bedecked tree and a sugar-filled cake. As David Plath, a renowned Japan-scholar, writes in a paper on the popularity of Christmas festivities in Japan, "Family Christmas gatherings do not center around dinner, as in the American ideal, but rather upon mutual partaking of a Christmas cake."

So why cake?

Well, sponge cake had been available in Japan since the 17th century, but the items needed to make it — sugar, milk and butter — were rarities on the island nation, so the cake was a luxury reserved for the elite. After WWII, Japan's economy rebounded, the ingredients became more widely available, and Japan's newly formed middle-class adopted this once-exclusive dessert as a symbol that they had finally made it.

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Japanese Christmas cake: It's even in your smartphone, on the emoji keyboard. NPR hide caption

itoggle caption NPR

Japanese Christmas cake: It's even in your smartphone, on the emoji keyboard.

NPR

And so, inspired by America, a wholly Japanese tradition was born. "The Christmas cake became a center of attention in the whole festival [of Christmas]," writes Konagaya.

Even the cake's shape and colors are symbolic: It's red and white, echoing the Japanese flag. And traditionally it's round. "Anything that's white and round would normally be associated with shrines," says Ashkenazi.

These days, Christmas cake has become so ingrained in Japanese culture that you can even find some in your smartphone: There are two versions of the cake on the emoji keyboard. (Emoji, as the name suggests, originated in Japan.) The cakes go on discount once Dec. 25th rolls around – a fact that's given birth to an unfortunate bit of Japanese slang: "Christmas cake" is used to refer to an unmarried woman who is over 25 and thus, considered past her prime. (Sigh. We know.)

However, while the cake has become firmly entrenched in Japanese culture, Christmas itself hasn't – it's not a national holiday in Japan. In fact, it's celebrated more like Valentine's Day is in America, and it's often thought of as a day for romantic couples to share. (It's also a big day for chowing down on KFC, but that's an entirely different story.)

Says Ashkenazi: "This [cake] is part of a whole complex of things that the Japanese adopted from the West, modified to their own needs, and have completely different meaning and different implications for Japanese society than from whatever host society they borrowed it from."

We haven't tried whipping up a Christmas cake ourselves, but if you're curious, this video from a Japanese cooking show called Cooking With Dogs has a recipe. Because nothing says Christmas like a dog chef in a Santa hat.

Alison Bruzek is a former intern with NPR.

Japanese food

Cake

Japan

Holidays

Christmas

Marvel Comics has provided some of Hollywood's biggest box office characters ever: The Avengers, the X-Men, the Guardians of the Galaxy, Iron Man, Spider-Man, all starring in gargantuan special effects blockbusters.

75 Years of Marvel Comics

From the Golden Age to the Silver Screen

by Roy Thomas and Josh Baker

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And like every super hero, Marvel Comics has an origin story. It begins in New York City, in 1939.

To compete against DC Comics' new Superman character, what was then called Timely Publications began selling 10-cent magazines with the illustrated adventures of its own champs: Captain America (a superhuman soldier), the Human Torch (a test-tube created android created who would catch fire around oxygen), and the Sub-Mariner (an undersea prince who hated humans).

World War II was on, so "naturally the big enemy we would have would be Hitler," says Stan Lee, Marvel's revered writer, editor, publisher, former president and chairman. "Captain America," he says "was always beating Hitler up every chance he had."

Lee's almost 92 years old now, but he started at Marvel when he was just 17. From office boy, he quickly graduated to writing the stories. Lee was a pen name for Stanley Martin Lieber.

"I wanted to save that name for the great novel that I would never write," he muses. "In the very beginning I was embarrassed to be writing comics 'cause most people had a very low opinion of them. But it was a living." A few years later, Lee enlisted in the Army and didn't return to Timely Comics till the war ended.

At that point, the company ditched its superhero stories, says longtime Marvel writer and editor Roy Thomas, author of a colossal new book that chronicles the company's history. Thomas says the superhero stories just weren't selling well. "After you've been fighting Nazis for several years, somehow fighting a bank robber isn't as exciting," he says. "They just had run out of steam. And there were newer things that came in."

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Stan Lee — shown here in 2002 — helped create Marvel mainstays like Spider-Man and the Avengers. Reed Saxon/AP hide caption

itoggle caption Reed Saxon/AP

Stan Lee — shown here in 2002 — helped create Marvel mainstays like Spider-Man and the Avengers.

Reed Saxon/AP

Marvel began putting out mysteries, horror comics, detective stories, fictionalized crime tales, even bible stories. And romances, most of which Lee wrote. "They were suppose to be confession stories by girls," says Lee. "So I came up with what I thought was a clever idea. I wrote 'as told to Stan Lee.' So I was able to get my name on all the stories."

Timely Publications became Marvel comics, and Lee says the genres came in waves. "The publisher, Martin Goodman, would just look at the sales figures, and he'd say "oh, Western books seem to be selling better this year, let's just do a lot of westerns." It'd work like that," says Lee. "It was funny, he had a fetish for certain names; he loved the word 'kid' for the westerns. So we had Kid Colt, Outlaw; the Texas Kid, the Rawhide Kid, the something else Kid, I can't even remember all the names but there were a lot of Kids."

By then, Lee was working with a group of artists, including Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. In 1961, the publisher asked them to create a superhero team to rival DC Comics' new Justice League of America. Marvel's response was the Fantastic Four: The Thing, Mr. Fantastic, Invisible Girl and new — actually human — Human Torch.

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In 1941, superheroes like Captain America were big business for Marvel publisher Martin Goodman. But after the war, as superhero popularity faded, Goodman favored Westerns and romance comics. Courtesy Jason Goodman and Taschen hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy Jason Goodman and Taschen

In 1941, superheroes like Captain America were big business for Marvel publisher Martin Goodman. But after the war, as superhero popularity faded, Goodman favored Westerns and romance comics.

Courtesy Jason Goodman and Taschen

"You could tell from the beginning this just wasn't going to be like all the other super hero comics," says Thomas. "They fought and argued. They didn't wear costumes at first. And when they did wear costumes, the Thing said "I ain't wearing this thing" and he throws it away. They start hitting each other. They talked with slang."

Lee and Kirby also created Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, the X-Men and Daredevil: Superheroes with flaws, living — and sometimes quarreling amongst themselves — in New York City, in a shared universe. "I kept it all local," says Lee. "They could all meet each other and guest star in the stories and it made them more fun for me. I think more surprising and more fun for the readers."

Lee's favorite superhero was an awkward adolescent. "I went into my publisher's office," Lee recalls, "I said I want to do a hero called Spider-Man, I want him to be a teenager and I want him to have a lot of personal problems, I think that will make it interesting. Well, this is the reception I got: 'You can't call a hero Spider-Man because people hate spiders, he can't be a teenager because only a sidekick can be a teenager and he can't have personal problems. Stan, don't you know what a superhero is? They don't have personal problems.'" But Spider-Man was a hit.

Join the Merry Marvel Marching Society!

Marvel's complex heroes set them apart from DC Comics. They were popular, says Thomas, because of their human emotions. "Not just sock, bam, pow. But real problems they had," he says. "You know, Spider-Man can't get a date and his aunt is having a heart attack. The heroes fight amongst themselves. This was what teenagers could relate to."

Lee remembers the company's Manhattan office were so tiny, there was no room to store the original artwork; secretary Flo Steinberg was tasked with giving or even throwing it away, to the chagrin of later comics collectors.
Most of the artists were freelancers working from home. But in every issue, Lee published letters to and from fans. Just like his Marvel universe, Lee says he wanted to create the illusion the staff was working in a boisterous bullpen.
In 1965, they made a promotional record, where Lee and his staff joked amongst themselves. "Well, well, Jolly Jack Kirby," Lee says in the recording. "Say a few words to the fans."

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"A few words," quips Kirby.

And there was a fan club called The Merry Marvel Marching Society, complete with its own theme song: "March along, march along, march along, march along with the Merry Marvel Marching Society," Lee sings from his office in Beverly Hills. He adds, "I wanted it to be like we're all in the same club and having a good time with it. Everything was for the fans."

Over the years, Thomas notes in the book, Marvel struggled financially; at one point the company was bailed out by rival DC, and later, by publishing Star Wars comic books before the movie franchise premiered. In the 1970s, Marvel characters began getting their own TV shows like The Incredible Hulk, and Saturday morning cartoons. And in recent years, Hollywood has begun unleashing its blockbuster hits based on Marvel superheroes.

Marvel's universe expanded, and developed legions of fans of all ages. Some of them showed up recently at the Hammer museum in Los Angeles, where Lee and Thomas signed autographs.

Among the admirers was Stanley West, a 58-year-old stock trader. "Stan, thank you very much," he told his idol. "I want to let you know I really appreciate what you've done, especially for black folk, when you had the first black comic book character."

"Damn right," answered Lee, who penned the Black Panther back in 1966.
Lee shows no signs of slowing down. With his company, Pow Entertainment, he's now working on Chinese, Indian and Latino superheroes for the movies. He's the subject of Roy Thomas' next book for Taschen. And he's making yet another cameo appearance in the upcoming Avengers movie.

As Marvel celebrates its 75 years, Stan Lee himself remains a comic book hero.