Tekiah Magazine

By Mara Riegel, December 2025

Credit: HomeGoods

As a little kid, maybe it wasn’t the most pious thing in the world, but I always wanted to decorate for the holidays the same way people who celebrated Christmas did. I wanted the tree and the fun lights and ornaments. It always felt like there was never anything for me as a Jew to get festive with around the holiday season. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve taken a more analytical mindset toward this subject and have started thinking about what Jews do have to choose from come holiday time and what we could have if there were ever a company willing to make it.

First and foremost, I don’t think that anything could be done to match quite the same level of festive cheer for us that a Christmas tree does for others. Christmas trees have become the premier symbol of the winter holiday season. They symbolize gifts and holiday joy, which is really lovely, but as Jews, we simply can’t partake if we abide by more traditional expectations of how to celebrate the holiday season. These trees are unmistakably for Christians and the Jews just don’t have a comparable vessel of festivity, much to my chagrin.

When I was in about sixth grade, to celebrate the miracle of light the Jews received after the successful fight against King Antiochus by the Maccabees, I asked my father if we could get a Hanukkah bush like my Belarusian friends had. Despite us being Eastern European Jews, it was a resounding no. I now understand that this was mostly because a lot of traditional Jews see Hanukkah bushes as a thinly veiled way to indeed just have a Christmas tree without admitting it.

My father, as well as the rest of my family, are all pretty traditional Jews in holiday practice, and I think that partaking in this sort of tradition is deeper than just decorations and festivity. I think in their eyes, it probably represents a desire to be more like another culture and less like my own, a sentiment with which I categorically do not align, even though the idea of those kinds of celebrations seems fun. Because that sentiment is important, for me, I have to scrap the idea of any kind of Hanukkah bush or holiday trees because it isn’t worth it, though I hold no judgment for anyone who does partake.

So that leaves us with what? Well, some of Hanukkah’s most identifiable symbols include dreidels and menorahs. Some things I’ve seen a lot of are enlarged menorahs that are lit in public spaces, or specially decorated menorahs and dreidels. A lot of what I’ve experienced when shopping to celebrate the holidays is that there are either a) limited options that you have to search for in the back corner or weird aisle end cap of a big store or b) handmade, personal iterations of these items made by the children of any given family or collected over the years from special places.

To address that first part, it is exhausting walking into a T.J. Maxx or a Home Goods and seeing a massive array of Christmas goods only to walk back and see a single shelf of thrown-around pieces of gelt and generic-looking menorahs. Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful that big stores like that even have Hanukkah things to begin with, but wouldn’t it be nice if the options were actually cute like the Christmas ones?

In the last year or so, there has been one singular item I’ve seen personally of cute Hanukkah merchandise available in one of those sorts of stores. It was a Dachshund menorah from Home Goods and it was probably the only holiday item I really wanted to buy all season. I would love it if we could get more genuinely cute options in a well-presented manner the same way these stores do with Christmas goods. These stores have shown that they are capable, as shown by making something actually cute and palatable like that Dachshund menorah, which makes me wonder if this lack of representation has less to do with a lack of capability and knowledge so much as a lack of desire to make us feel represented and included.

On that second point of homemade and sentimental holiday pieces, I will never negate the value of those pieces within a home. In my own home, the mezuzah I made in Hebrew school as a toddler hung in my bedroom doorway until we moved, and even now, I think it’s still up in our new house. Homemade and personal goods absolutely have a place in holiday celebrations, but to be honest, I am a shopper and I like engaging with the rampant consumerism that comes with the holiday season. So is it too much to ask that stores make genuinely cute stuff for our community when we do indeed have the capacity to spend our money with them in honor of the holidays? 

Much to my delight, some stores have indeed heard this message and have taken steps toward making genuinely cute holiday merchandise for Jews. A good example of a store leading by example here is Kendra Scott. I work at a Kendra Scott store, and the second I saw our new holiday line and there was a cute little dreidel necklace right up there next to the candy cane and gingerbread pieces, I actually jumped for joy. Not only did they make a piece that acknowledged our community, they made one that was genuinely desirable and didn’t bury it between the shelves. The same has been repeated this season with loungewear company P.J. Salvage, among others.

Other stores can do the same, and some already have. As long as stores put in the effort to show us as a community that our joy matters too, maybe some other kid won’t have to fantasize about Christmas trees of their own because their celebrations will be just as festive and important.