The story of Greggs’ controversial Christmas advent calendar has made its way across the pond and coverage is more than a little flakey.
The bakery came under fire earlier this week when an image in its new Christmas advent calendar replaced baby Jesus with a sausage roll.
If the idea of Americans talking about our humble Greggs wasn’t bizarre enough, their description of what a sausage roll is has been questionable to say the least.
On Twitter, USA Today referred to a sausage roll as a “delicacy”, calling it “a pastry wrapped around sausage meat”.
It isn’t the first time sausage rolls have caused something of a stir across the pond.
In 2015, The New York Times introduced the snack to an American audience prompting confusion and, let’s face it, jealousy.
Earlier this year, US food chain Trader Joe’s attempted to launch a “genius” new product called “puff dogs”, which were essentially sausage rolls. Needless to say the brand was dragged quite mercilessly on Twitter.
The confusion may have arisen from the fact that American’s have many popular sausage-based products of their own, from corn dogs to their version of pigs in blankets (pictured below), which are similar to our sausage rolls.
Needless to say, Brits were amused by the American publications’ description.
Meanwhile die-hard Greggs fans thought sausage rolls deserved to receive the unexpected praise.
The controversial nativity image appears behind one of the doors in Greggs’ first advent calendar. The calendar contains a different token for each day, which can be taken into Greggs stores and exchanged for a snack.
On Twitter, some Christians called for a boycott of Greggs due to the image.
In response to complaints a Greggs spokesperson said in a statement: “We’re really sorry to have caused any offence, this was never our intention.”
Personally, we don’t think you can beat a good, quintessentially British “pastry wrapped around sausage meat”.