I can see where the reversal comes from, if the PPC indeed runs in an opposite* endian mode from the Intel.

However, I understand even less where the difference mentioned in the OP comes from.
On my 32 bit Vista virtual machine it prints "Kerry Cthistmas!", but windows users in this thread reported that their windows perl prints the correct message.

Perhaps the perl compile-time flags give a clue into this mistery?
The 64 bit Ubuntu 9.10, perl 5.10.0 version:
MULTIPLICITY PERL_DONT_CREATE_GVSV PERL_IMPLICIT_CONTEXT PERL_MALLOC_WRAP USE_64_BIT_ALL USE_64_BIT_INT USE_ITHREADS USE_LARGE_FILES USE_PERLIO USE_REENTRANT_API

The 32 bit Vista perl 5.10.0 (Camelbox build) version:
MULTIPLICITY PERL_DONT_CREATE_GVSV PERL_IMPLICIT_CONTEXT PERL_IMPLICIT_SYS PERL_MALLOC_WRAP PL_OP_SLAB_ALLOC USE_ITHREADS USE_LARGE_FILES USE_PERLIO

* I always found this endian business a horrible mess - especially that there are certain combinations of CPUs, OSes and compilers where mixed endianness occurs.

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