NOT SO COOL
Karen von Hahn thought the candle would charm her niece. But the image wasn’t so cute, after all,
Now I am not normally one for cutesy animals.
Much as I admire the beauty of the natural world, I do not follow cats on Instagram. Nor do I find the need to fill my home or closet with adorable reproductions of the feline species.
But in this case, I had just received the news that my brother and his family were going to drive up from New York to join us for the holidays, so I’d popped into one of those cat lady stationery places to stock up on festive frippery like gift tags and Christmas crackers, when this candle caught my eye.
Shaped like a polar bear sniffing the Arctic air, with a wick in its broad white back and an inquisitive expression I thought might charm my visiting niece and nephews, the candle — which already seemed to have way more personality than anything (or anyone?) else made of wax I had ever encountered at Madame Tussauds’ — was clearly the missing link in my as-yet-unplanned tablescape.
Besides, hadn’t my 10-year-old niece gone through a whole polar bear phase at some point? I remember she used to refer to them as “pole-ya” bears, and absolutely had to have anything — from an ice cream wrapper to a coffee mug — if it had a polar bear on it. Sold! Even if she was bigger now, and that was before she could say “polar” bear properly, she was still going to love it.
Cut to the day they arrived. In a mad frenzy of preparation, I had already laid in the larder, lit the fire and the fully dressed house was glowing with holiday cheer.
After dropping her coat and boots in the front hall, Isabelle walked into the dining room and straight over to the little Arctic installation I had set in the window, featuring the polar bear candle on a mirrored ice floe under a “sky” of mercury glass balls.
“Sad,” she said, fingering the wick in his back. “Are you really going to light it?”
Needless to say, this was not quite the reaction I had been hoping for. And yet my young niece did have a point.
There was something about the candle that was more strange than cute. Whoever was responsible for coming up with such a notion at the factory in China where these candles must have been churned out by the container-full, it probably failed to register that perhaps there was something inherently troubling in the very idea of setting a polar bear on fire.
In the way that the widely circulated photo of the doomed polar bears clinging to the last remaining chunk of ice in the melting Arctic seemed somehow to resonate with us as if we too were the bears, and it was the very picture of the world in 2016, turning a species now endangered by global warming into a candle is the wax equivalent of a meme. And one that turns out to be not so cute after all. Karen von Hahn is a Toronto-based writer, trend observer and style commentator. Contact her at kvh@karenvonhahn.com.