How I learned to love the new Hanukkah kitsch

Celebration of identity has taken on an ironic twist, Paula Simons writes.

Among my favourite bits of Yiddish vocabulary is “tchotchke.”

It’s hard to translate into English. A knicknack? A trinket? A doodad? Those words don’t quite capture the kitschy appeal of a true tchotchke, something that’s both tacky and endearingly appealing.

This time of year, stores are full of Christmas tchotchkes of all varieties, from lightup reindeer to Bobblehead Santas to creches where all the characters in the nativity scene are bears.

But until recently, Hanukkah had been a blessedly tchotchke-free festival. Families had menorahs, the traditional holiday candelabra, and perhaps a few little wooden dreidels, the traditional holiday tops. And that was about it.

But no longer.

Oy.

Hanukkah began Tuesday at sundown, and stores and websites are full of goofy Hanukkah stuff. Ugly Hanukkah sweaters. Ugly Hanukkah sweaters for dogs. Menorahs in the shapes of dinosaurs and moose.

Dreidels made into fidget spinners. Fidget spinners made into dreidels.

Three years ago, the world was introduced to the Mensch on the Bench, the creation of former Hasbro employee Neal Hoffman, who invented the toy after his kids asked for an Elf on the Shelf. This year, Mensch on the Bench has a family of companion toys marketed to “put the funukkah in Hanukkah”: Dreidel the Dog; Hannah, the Hanukkah Hero; and my favourite, the “Ask Bubbe” doll, who answers all your questions, Magic 8-Ball style, except with Jewish grandmotherly clichés.

This winter, I walked into Andy’s Valleyview IGA, Edmonton’s go-to store for Jewish holiday supplies, to find a kit to make a gingerbread Hanukkah House.

Poor Hanukkah. It’s not a very big or important Jewish holiday.

But because it happens to fall at roughly the same time as Christmas, it gets swamped in this season of rampant commercialism, caught up in the absurd December consumer whirl.

Kliel Rose is the rabbi at Edmonton’s Beth Shalom Conservative synagogue. When he walked into the IGA and saw those Hanukkah houses, he was surprised. But not horrified.

“I have no issue with the gingerbread house. I don’t think it’s appropriating Christian iconography. Not at all. Historically, Jews have always been borrowing customs and styles from the surrounding community where we were living,” he says.

“I know something like this is supposed to drive someone like me mad. The negative voice inside me says this just illustrates how Jewishly illiterate our own people are. I could sit here and lament that Hanukkah is being celebrated like Christmas.

“I could lament how little people — including a lot of Jews — realize that Hanukkah is a minor, post-Biblical holiday, and not one of the major sacred religious ones. But on the other hand, the optimist in me sees this as a way for Jews to celebrate their Jewish identity. And that’s terrific.”

Many of his Christian clerical colleagues, he says, bemoan the commercialization of Christmas, the loss of the holiday’s spirituality.

But Hanukkah, he says, may be better able to bear the weight of commercialization because it’s not the same kind of sacred celebration. Funny sweaters or tacky toys for a deeply spiritual holiday like Yom Kippur, he says, would ignite a backlash. But for Hanukkah, it seems more acceptable.

There is something a wee bit subversive about all these Hanukkah sweaters and Hanukkah socks and Hanukkah houses.

They don’t so much copy Christmas traditions as send them up, with an ironic wink.

A new generation of North American Jews, after all, is growing up in the face of ugly eruptions of anti-Semitism from both the far left and the far right.

They’re coming of age in a world where young neoNazis chant “The Jews will not replace us.”

In such a world, we all need more light in the darkness. And more mensches — righteous people — on benches and off them.

And maybe we need to proudly wear more silly sweaters, too.