Pepper Ann S3E6: "A Kosher Christmas"

This review was commissioned by @ArlequineLunaire. Going public with it out of queue order for seasonal resonance.


This episode gave me some very complicated feelings. Its message is positive. Its humor is pretty good, mostly. Growing up Jewish in America, there were a lot of details that I could relate to, and a couple that felt downright nostalgic for me.

But the entire thing also has an uncanniness to it. A kind of painted-on feeling that somehow makes me feel not only unconvinced, but outright unnerved. It took me until the end of the episode to figure out what it was, but now that I've gotten it I think I know why the "Dances With Ignorance" episode also didn't land for me.

"Pepper Ann" takes place in a world with no hatred. And that's a problem.


"A Kosher Christmas" is focused on Pepper Ann's interfaith parentage, and the eclectic and awkward situation that this creates around the holidays. The show does kind of cheat to make the situation tenser, by framing Christmas and Channukah (and Pepper's Christian and Jewish extended families) as competing for the same bit of her time. Realistically, even in the minority of years when Christmas does fall on Channukah (this year, 2024, being one of them. Amusing coincidence.), the fact that Christmas is one day and Channukah is eight means that making time for both sets of relatives shouldn't be a challenge. But, I get the underlying concept that the episode is going for, so I won't sweat the ergonomics.

The inciting incident for this conflict is when, just before winter break, Pepper Ann is cast in a really cringey school play about celebrating diversity, in which the kids play as representations of different winter holidays from their cultures.

...

And yes, obviously, this scene does everything it possibly can to shill Kwanzaa. Have any of you ever actually met someone who celebrates Kwanzaa? I swear to god, white children's TV writers in the 90's and 2000's were the largest demographic of that holiday's celebrants.

...

In her typically overambitious, impractical way, Pepper tries out for the roles of both Channukah and Christmas, and despite the drama teacher's misgivings she's able to get a double role. Once again, ignore the ergonomics here; realistically, a plurality white American high school like hers is going to have stiff competition over who gets to be Christmas and there's no chance in hell they'd let someone have it AND another holiday, but that's not the point.

Predictably, Pepper Ann can't keep her two roles straight, and on the night of the performance - in front of an audience of everyone's parents - she starts singing a Christmas song while dressed up as a menorah and prompted to explain what Channukah is.

Her Yiddish-accented maternal grandparents are with her mother in the audience, and it's right after Pepper has her (very predictable) embarrassing mixup that her grandmother starts hyperventilating and needs to be dragged away for medical attention. In the aftermath of the botched play, Pepper-Ann hears her mother tell her grandfather that "she really just needs to choose one or the other, or this will keep happening."

Now, obviously, Pepper Ann misinterprets what she's seeing and hearing. Her grandmother has a respiratory issue that coincidentally started acting up at that moment, and she has two different doctors that she keeps bouncing between, so they weren't sure which of them to call at this point. Only a kid would think that they were talking about her, and that they expected her to choose one side of her family to outright reject. Obviously.

But...the problem I have with this is that, in the world of the show, Pepper's mother and grandparents seemingly weren't upset by what they saw at all. And this is one of many places where the episode starts to feel like a duck blind painted with slightly-off images from my own childhood.

The rest of this episode's plot is pretty much what you would have predicted. There are some pretty good gags throughout, affectionately throwing shade at irritating bits of both Ashkenazi and Anglican culture in a way that a person from either background would probably chuckle and nod along with (overly clingy Jewish relatives, bad English food, etc). There's also a whacky B-plot about one of Pepper's friend's devoting her winter break to charity, getting frustrated when no one appreciates her for it, and then this leading to everyone winning a free trip to Hawaii somehow.

Weird and random, but mostly in the fun way. I liked it better than the A-plot that took up most of the episode's runtime before coming to its feel-good conclusion with Pepper Ann realizing she was making a big deal out of nothing and accepting that there is no contradiction within her background that needs addressing.

...

You know how I said that the "Dances With Ignorance" episode was weirdly nonchalant about Pepper Ann's mother being weirdly nonchalant about what her daughter was doing? And how it presented Native Americans as some kind of model minority, even while also acknowledging that dehumanizing stereotypes are crowding their actual personhood out of America's general consciousness, without seeming to realize the contradiction?

I'm not Native American, but I am Ashkenazi, so I can talk much more confidently about this episode than I could that one. If you go up to an Ashkenazi Jew living in a Christian majority western country like the United States or England or whatever, and ask them what they think about Christianity, they'll probably say something like "they're okay" or "they have their way, we have ours, it's all good."

And they will be lying to your fucking face. We hate Christians. How could we possibly not?

I could go on at length about smaller details. Like how the need to compete with Christmas has turned the very minor Jewish holiday of Channukah into a bloated theme park mascot that blots out our much more important holy days, which stories like this episode only further encourage. Like this episode's presentation of European Judaism and European Christianity as something along the lines of two equal neighbours that can mix freely and without duress. Like the fact that watching their granddaughter put on a menorah costume and sing Christmas songs actually might send someone of that age with that accent to the hospital.

Tell me, show. Why does Pepper Ann have access to a Halloween costume version of Navajo culture that she can freely engage with and indulge in, while the actual Navajo family just have to do their thing alone in their own house? Why are they living here, surrounded by white people who treat them like shit, with nowhere better to go? Who created the version of them Pepper latched onto, and why did they create it?

Why are Pepper Ann's grandparents living in the United States, instead of in Germany or the Czech Republic or any of those other countries they mentioned in that episode?

You want to be socially conscious, show? Then grow some fucking balls and stop pretending these symptoms exist without a cause. Why is tolerance so important? What's the thing you're trying to protect us from? Why do these problems that you're teaching Pepper (and, by proxy, the audience) about exist in the first place?

You might say that a kids' show isn't the place to get this heavy. In return, I would point to current political developments and say that treating this subject matter lightly might be part of what got us here.


Happy Kwanzaa everyone.