Forget this “war on Christmas” business — it’s Hanukkah that’s on the endangered list in 2016.
It’s bad enough that we have to compete with Christmas every season, but just when I thought the Jews had suffered enough, another slight: The first night of Hanukkah this year collides with Christmas Eve.
Which self-hating member of the tribe decided to throw Hanukkah under the bus?
But the war on Hanukkah doesn’t end there.
Take my local Pier 1 Imports and Bed, Bath & Beyond, seemingly innocuous bastions of inoffensive home improvement. Lately, their displays of forced cheer feel like a passive-aggressive assault on my people.
Imagine my dismay when I walked through the doors to behold cozy arrangements of wreaths, stockings and dazzling stringed lights — in the Hanukkah section.
Sorry, Pier 1 and BBB execs: Taking traditional Christmas accoutrements and painting them blue and white doesn’t make them Hanukkah-approved. And don’t even get me started on the gingerbread “Chanukah House.”
We are, once again, in the words of my spiritual leader Barbra Streisand, chopped liver
What’s next? Throw pillows stitched “Oy to the world”? Bethlehem-based Hanukkah cookbooks for ham-infused latkes?
We are, once again, in the words of my spiritual leader Barbra Streisand, chopped liver.
But it’s not just tone-deaf manufacturers who are falsely lumping the two very distinct holidays and eroding individual cultural traditions in the process: Members of the tribe themselves have become complicit in the misguided mashup.
Christmas decorators are actually fielding requests for blue-hued house lights. According to Joseph Manieri of Long Island company Distinctive Holiday Displays, Hanukkah requests over the past few years have included blue and white lights, “subdued” clear lights along the roof, and 6-foot freestanding fiberglass menorahs.
A typical “Festival of Lights” job could crack “a couple of thousand dollars,” says Manieri. “It’s all about doing something that makes people feel joyful.”
But “light unto the nations” doesn’t mean co-opting beloved Christmas traditions and diluting your own.
Besides, everyone knows that the only authentic cultural mashup this Christmas should be between Jews and the butterfly shrimp at their local Chinese restaurant.