McDonalds Holiday Warmers

Christmas is here, and you know what that means: chickenshit media calling it the "holiday season", Christmas carols using the wrong arrangement, and McDonalds Canada creating two new Christmas-themed burgers.

Okay, you may not remember that last part ever happening before. That's okay, it hasn't really happened this year either. But having tried both of the McDonalds December Taste of the Month 'sensations' I'm here to give you a rundown of what you can look forward to.

The Jolly Burger:
McDonald's beef burger for December is something called the Jolly Burger. It's a plain beef burger with white cheddar cheese, grilled onions, lettuce, and "creamy peppercorn sauce". The first thing you taste is the onions, which are a very overpowering flavour to hit you with. I generally like fried onions when I fry up a burger on a chilly Saturday afternoon when I can't BBQ, but this really does make the Jolly Burger taste too much like a homemade burger. I'm not much for food ratings, and this is YMMV territory, but I wouldn't rate this any higher than a 3/10, and even that's generous.

The Chicken Celebration:

McDonald's chicken burger is generally much better. Called the "Celebration Chicken" (because we want alliteration but we don't want to mention Christmas) the piece of chicken you get with it is fairly decent: it's thick but still processed rather than just being a plain chicken breast, which makes it a fair bit denser. It's sort of the chicken equivalent of the patty you get on a Fillet-o-Fish. The real beauty of this thing: they put sauce on both sides of the burger. Finally: it's like pulling teeth to try to get it at KFC like that (see sidebar). Like the Jolly Burger this comes with lettuce and spicy sauce but no tomato, which like the Jolly Burger is much appreciated. Again food ratings aren't my thing but I think a 7/10 sounds about right. This would have been way higher had they put on a real piece of chicken breast.

McDonalds has several other menu items available for their winter warmers menu, but these are the only two main course items, and I gotta say it's quite a letdown. The Celebration Chicken is good, but is roughly equivalent to their regular chicken menu items. The Jolly Burger is probably their worst burger on the menu, which means that if you find yourself wolfing it down you won't be particularly jolly. And this is supposed to be a Christmas promotion yet they never thought to put cranberry sauce on their chicken burger? Granted cranberry sauce is more of a turkey thing, but I'm not sure a grilled piece of processed turkey would be the smart move either. But at least it would be Christmasy. And I'm afraid we're a long way away from a real Christmas burger from McDonalds: goose.