What? A cartoon?!?!?
So my in-person and Facebook friends have heard about this already, and that is a shame for them, because MY RANT SHALL NOT BE STOPPED!
But first, a disclaimer. I love the Vermont Country Store catalog. It fills me with warm nostalgia for a WASP-y, flannel pajamaed life I never actually led. I want to buy their ribbon candy; I want to sleep in their comfy Lanz nightgowns. One of these days I will get myself a Tangee lipstick. Also, they’re amazing when you’re shopping a 1940s-1950s show.
But they have a wheelhouse, and that wheelhouse is horehound drops and vintge Christmas ornaments. Jewish pastry is just not their thing. Behold my evidence:
- Those are not Hamentaschen. For the uninitiated, a Hamentasch is made by folding a thin circle of dough (punched out with a water glass, because cookie cutters, what are we, goyim?) around a filling, generally poppyseed, prune (sigh), or jam. That bullshit up there is clearly a triangular thumbprint cookie with some tiny stupid dollop of jam in the center depression.
- ‘In the traditional shape Hamentashen is known for’ are you fucking kidding me. I’m not sure whether they think ‘Hamentashen’ is a place name or a singular noun, but they’re wrong either way. (At this juncture on Facebook my brother asked if anyone ever really uses the word Hamentasch, and the answer is twofold: yes, I do, don’t mess with a Ravenclaw, and no, no one does because the correct amount of Hamentaschen is as many as possible.)
- Strawberry jam? Are you Vermonters just constantly high? Look, there’s no way around it, strawberry is just a really goyish flavour. No Jew has ever made a strawberry pastry. Apricot yes, raspberry certainly, these have a little sourness built in. They’ve got tsuris. Prunes, I mean, that’s just sadness and sweetness rolled together in its purest form. Jews are not good at unalloyed sweetness; we don’t know how to be as uncomplicatedly happy as strawberry jam requires. They could only have gone more goyish with grape, or maybe mayonnaise.
So anyway, I have both tweeted at them and Facebooked them, and nothing. I’m not mad about that part, though, because I figure no way do the elderly couple who clearly run Vermont country store know why the computer keeps beeping at them.
In my head their names are John and Martha, and they had a young intern who handled the social media, but he’s busy sleeping off an extra large dose of the horehound candy.
. . . Holy shit, I just checked and it’s actually run by Lyman Orton and his sons, Cabot, Gardner, and Eliot, and that is a level of New England-ness I can only dream of. Dammit, Orton family, leave the Judaica be so I can go back to loving you unreservedly.
Neurotic Owl 