For over a century, American Jews have eaten American Chinese food on Christmas. The annual feast is a holiday tradition that is likely to go on as usual this year, even in the midst of COVID-19 — albeit in the form of delivery or takeout. This pastime has evolved to a near-holy tradition, parodied on Saturday Night Live, analyzed in academic papers, and reaffirmed by Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan.     

Perhaps the foremost expert on the practice is Rabbi Joshua Eli Plaut, PhD, executive director of American Friends of Rabin Medical Center, rabbi of Metropolitan Synagogue in New York, and author of A Kosher Christmas, the premier (and only?) comprehensive study of what Jews do at Christmastime.

I spoke to Plaut about Chinese food on Christmas, and why he used to sit on Santa Claus’s lap.  

Both Jews and Christmas have existed for a while. When did Jews first ask, “What should we do on Christmas?”  
It has been a question for as long as Christmas has existed, because Jews have always felt like outsiders. But how they felt specifically was really a function of their status in society. In Eastern Europe, for instance, Jews were not very assimilated. Christmas was a night of possible pogroms and violence, with so many celebrants, often drunk, going from house to house. Jews did not go to the synagogue to study. They stayed at home for physical safety reasons. If they did anything, they might play cards or chess.

In Western Europe, after the French Revolution, Jews were more assimilated. There, they had more freedom to wonder, “Do I bring a Christmas tree into my home? Do I have a holiday meal? Do I give out gifts?” The early Zionist Theodor Herzl was a secular Jew, and he had a Christmas tree in his salon. After the Chief Rabbi of Vienna came to visit, he wrote something in his diary like, ”I hope the Rabbi doesn’t think less of me because of this. Then again, what do I care what he thinks?”   

Okay, so tell me when eating Chinese food on Christmas first comes into the picture. Is that a Jewish-American tradition?  
Yes. It begins at the end of the 19th century, on the Lower East Side, where Jewish and Chinese immigrants lived in close proximity. The very first mention of American Jews eating in a Chinese restaurant dates to 1899, when the American Hebrew journal criticized Jews for eating at non-kosher restaurants. By 1936, a publication called the East Side Chamber News reported at least 18 Chinese tea gardens and chop suey eateries in heavily-populated Jewish neighborhoods. All of these were within close walking distance of Ratner’s, which was then the most famous Jewish dairy restaurant in Manhattan.

Jews would go out for Chinese food on Sundays, when they felt left out of church lunch. It was a gradual transition from the traditional diet of Eastern Europe, to eating American Chinese food, to eating other pan-Asian cuisines, like Indian food. I like to say that, within a hundred years of arriving in New York, the average Jew was more familiar with sushi than gefilte fish.

In the last 35 years, Chinese restaurants on Christmas have really become this sort of temporary community where Jews in the United States can gather to be with friends and family. It’s a secular way to celebrate Christmas, but it’s also a time to shut out Christmas and announce your Jewish identity in a safe environment.

Was there any reason, beyond proximity, that Jews wound up eating Chinese food, as opposed to some other immigrant cuisine?
In terms of kosher law, a Chinese restaurant is a lot safer than an Italian restaurant. In Italian food, there is mixing of meat and dairy. A Chinese restaurant doesn’t mix meat and dairy, because Chinese cooking is virtually dairy-free.

In Chinese-American cooking, if there is any pork [which is not a kosher food], it is usually concealed inside something, like a wonton. A lot of Jews back then — and even now — kept strict kosher inside the home but were more flexible with foods they ate at restaurants. Sociologist Gaye Tuchman wrote about this practice. She described [the plausible deniability of non-kosher ingredients] as safe treyf. [Treyf is the Yiddish word for non-kosher.] A lot of Jews considered the pork in Chinese food to be safe treyf, because they couldn’t see it. That made it easier to eat.  

In your research for this book, did you come across anything about Chinese food and Christmas written from a Chinese-American perspective?
I actually found a citation from 1935, in the New York Times, about a restaurant owner named Eng Shee Chuck who brought chow mein to the Jewish Children’s Home on Christmas Day. If you were to interview Chinese restaurant owners, they’d tell you that Christmas is their biggest day of the year, outside of probably the Chinese New Year. If you want a more thorough understanding, though, you should probably go talk to some restaurant owners in Chinatown.     

Sometimes my family eats Chinese food on Christmas, but we always go to the movies. When did that become an established Jewish Christmas tradition?
When Jews began to settle on the Lower East Side of Manhattan between the 1880s and the 1920s, they were poor immigrants. They worked in sweatshops and lived in tenement housing. In their time off, they would go to the newly opened nickelodeons. For between one cent and five cents, they could see a very early form of a movie. By 1909, there were 42 nickelodeons adjacent to the Lower East Side and 10 uptown in Jewish Harlem. Christmas was just another day off, so these early movies attracted big crowds.

We know from the Yiddish press that Christmas became a popular day for the opening of new Yiddish theater productions. It was a day off from work, so what do you do? You can stay home, or you can go to the nickelodeons, or the Yiddish theater. Eventually, decades later, you could go have a meal in a Chinese restaurant.

What do you usually do on Christmas?
For many years I was researching this book. This year, I’ll be with my family in a small town, where there are no real restaurants open. We will probably play a board game or watch Netflix.   

What did you do on Christmas growing up?  
I never went to Chinese restaurants. We’d go skating in front of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, and then we’d have hot chocolate with marshmallows. I have great memories of Christmas. My mother would take me to sit on Santa Claus’s lap. When I was writing this book, I asked her, “Why did you take me — the son of a rabbi! — to sit on Santa Claus’s lap?” She said, “Everybody in America does it, so why shouldn’t we?” She knew I was secure in my Jewish identity.

The mall never celebrates Christmas directly, only the white space around it. A tree goes up at the end of November, ushering in the pre-Christmas sales that begin with Black Friday and don’t let up until Christmas Eve. On Christmas itself, the mall is usually closed. Out of this fold in American spacetime, the new after-Christmas sales are re-spawned. Shoppers emerge from their celebration bunkers, dragging their bags of gifts to return. Such was the scene the day after Christmas at the Roosevelt Field Mall in East Garden City, New York.

The parking garage was reasonably crowded. Could it be a sign that the economy was healthy? That consumer confidence was up? I don’t know. A sale is a double-edged kind of hope — not quite faith in the strength of tomorrow, but maybe a chance to beat the house today. As far as I know, there are two kinds of sales. Fake sales lure you into a store with one or two discounted items, hoping a full-price thing will catch your eye. Real sales lure you in all the same, then send you away with a bunch of cheap stuff, clearing out space for new products to sell.

On the day after Christmas, the shopper’s main question is whether the sales will be real. After so many sales, would stores slash prices further? Inside the mall, the window displays were designed to respond with a flirtatious, “Maybe!” The fantasy of the day after Christmas takes place in the bargain basement, an imaginary space beyond the fourth wall where objects must be sold, posthaste. Quick, there is no time for window dressing! Get the products out on the floor!

At New York & Company, a non-glossy poster announced new “Last Chance Clearance” prices. At Madewell, a tattered canvas flag declared the “Big Deal End of Season Sale.” At J.Crew, butcher paper — still on the roll! — ushered in “The Main Event.” Here was a business-to-business aesthetic, gussied up for the sake of the consumer — the backroom by way of the window display. It promised a wholesaler’s pricing, or did it? You’d have to come inside to find out.  

Inside Bath & Body Works, Christmas-scented soaps and candles overflowed red cardboard boxes. The setup evoked a back-alley deal, but also a full recycling bin. With Christmas once again a year away, stocking stuffers look suspiciously like trash; for just one day, on December 26, Winter Candy Apple and Gingerbread Swirl eclipse the noxious smell of garbage. At American Eagle, a water-filled phone case proclaimed SQUAD GOALS, as Santa-shaped sequins floated by on their sleighs. Nearby, sexy Christmas boxers sold themselves for 60 percent off. Who was left to buy these products? Where would they end up if nobody did? All across the mall, the fruit was rotting on the tree.  

The shoe store Journeys took an optimistic tack, decreeing the day a “Treat Yo Self” sale. Was Christmas morning a big disappointment? Why not ensure that you get yours? This sale embodied its own kind of bleakness — that of hollow consumer empowerment, of corporate pleas for relevance, of family members too unfamiliar to pick out the right pair of shoes. Two stores down, I found my own salvation. There, Long Island Catholic Supply was running a small, unadvertised sale on Christmas ornaments. The rest of the store remained full price, assured of its longevity, despite a lack of shoppers.

At the end of the day, I spent about $200 — on jeans from Macy’s, on socks from Dick’s, on HeatTech long-john pants from Uniqlo. The cashiers all wished me a belated “Happy Holidays,” betraying the nonsense meaning of the phrase but also the hollowness of retail without it. Now that Christmastime had passed, what could I say to excuse the whole production? For next week, at least, I would have, “Happy New Year!” After that, until Valentine’s Day, I’d just be buying stuff for no reason.

Over by the exit to the mall, two young women were packing away the Christmas village display. Their coats were piled on Santa’s chair. They sat at the base of the Christmas tree, winding a giant pile of cords.

“What are you doing?” I asked stupidly.  

“We’re packing up the Christmas tree.”

“Have you done this before?”

“We do it every day after Christmas.”

And with that, I wished them a “Happy New Year,” and made my way back to the parking garage.

The holidays are a time of haunting — old flames, family drama, memories of holidays past. And this year, it seems, there’s a new ghost in town, following shoppers wherever they click. It’s an ad with a picture of photoshopped socks, warning interlopers: IF YOU CAN READ THIS LEAVE ME ALONE I AM WATCHING HALLMARK MOVIES.

I first saw this ad while I was riding the train and reading a Daily Mail article about Huma Abedin “grabbing dinner in New York City” with Harvey Weinstein’s ex-wife Georgina Chapman. It appeared at the bottom, in what is commonly known as the chum box, alongside ads for Ancestry.com and a facial product that is “so in demand” it has eluded the editors of Town & Country magazine.

In any case, I remember the ad because I actually clicked through to purchase the socks. (Lindsey, if you’re reading this, I got you novelty Hallmark socks for Christmas!) So overcome by the cuteness of my find, I rushed into work and told the Goods team, “Look at these socks that I bought for my friend!”

As it turns out, the ads for the socks had been following my colleagues all around the internet. My editor Meredith Haggerty — who could not believe I was such a sucker as to buy them — first saw the ad in a BuzzFeed post. My other editor Julia Rubin saw it on the website for a “hard news site, like a newspaper.” At first, fellow Goods reporter Chavie Lieber said she hadn’t come across the ad; the very next day, she saw it online while researching a story about wooden toys.

It seemed these socks were everywhere. From left foot and right, they rejected the advances of all who threatened made-for-TV joy.

On Twitter, a search for “Hallmark socks” delivered many vocal detractors. John Overholt, a curator of early modern manuscripts at Harvard, wondered why the sock ad had marked him as a target. “I don’t have cable, so I haven’t seen any Hallmark movies,” he told me over DM. “I am a big fan of high-quality socks, however, so if someone would like to target me with ads for luxurious over-the-calf men’s dress socks, they’d have a much better chance of success.”

Brock Hand, a 33-year-old father of two, said he thinks he saw the ad on either Gizmodo, the Outline, or the Cut. He does not watch Hallmark movies, but he does sometimes listen to a podcast that discusses them. Other than that, he doesn’t really have a theory for why he might be getting the ad. “I’ve browsed some shirt sites, like Teespring and Cotton Bureau, so maybe [that’s why]? It’s not based on IP address, as my wife has no idea what I was talking about.”

The main sock ad that appears in the chum box is paid for by a site called Fairy Season, which sells affordable clothes with pithy slogans, like this $6.99 muscle tee emblazoned with the phrase, “Killin’ My Liver at the River.” The site was launched in 2012 and is registered to an entity called Shen Zhen Shi Yi Jing Dian Zi Shang Wu You Xian Gong Si in Guangdong, China. The socks are for sale from other websites too, including PinkClassy (registered to “Redacted for Privacy” in Chengdu, China), Fechicin (registered to “Domains By Proxy, LLC,” in Scottsdale, Arizona), GearGap (registered to “Contact Privacy Inc.” in Toronto), and InspireUplift (no registration listed).

None of these websites returned requests for comment, but most are hosted on Shopify, a commonly used platform for dropship businesses. Dropshipping is a business model with very low startup costs; retailers process orders from clients and fulfill them directly through a wholesaler’s website. “The barriers to entry are really low,” said Chavie, who has written about dropshipping businesses before. “Anyone with $20 can start a biz on Shopify.”  

The Hallmark socks are available from the Chinese wholesale marketplace Alibaba for about 80 cents per pair — a very low price compared to the $6 to $12 that the Shopify sites are charging. (I paid $10.28, with shipping.) This ridiculously high margin, minus the cost of a few chum box ads, makes for a pretty good business proposition.

That, of course, doesn’t answer the question of who thought to print these socks in the first place. According to Google Trends, the phrase “If You Can Read This Leave Me Alone I Am Watching Hallmark Movies” was first searched on December 1 of this year. Does it reference the 2015 Drake album If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late? Or perhaps the classic upside-down shirt “If you can read this, put me back on my barstool”? Who knows! Like the much older “Keep Calm and Carry On,” it has mutated quickly into many variations, including “If You Can Read This I’m Watching Hallmark Christmas Movies,” “Do Not Disturb I’m Watching Hallmark Christmas Movies,” and “Turn On Hallmark And Bring Me Wine.”

Representatives for the Hallmark Channel did not respond to my request for comment. Maybe they don’t care about the copyright infringement, or maybe they’re all curled up on the couch in their own “If You Can Read This I’m Dropshipping” socks.   

I make about half of my purchases online — a statistically average behavior for a 26-year-old, but one that tends to generate boxes. Managing this influx of boxes is annoying. Intact, they clutter my small New York apartment; collapsed, they don’t fit inside my kitchen trash can.

The way I usually deal with this mess is by flattening the boxes, turning them on end, and shoving them between my trashcan and the wall. I call this method the “bookend method.” It is not particularly effective. Often when I step on the pedal to the trash can, the swinging force of the opening lid knocks the upright cardboard out of place. Or sometimes the flattened cardboard itself prevents the lid from being swung open.

In any case, the problem gets worse as the bushel of boxes gets larger and larger. It’s a very small problem, but it annoys me every day, like a stair that is slightly taller than the rest.   

I’m not the only one with too much cardboard. In 2017, Amazon alone shipped more than 5 billion items to homes worldwide, largely in paper envelopes and cardboard boxes. Blue Apron sends 8 million cardboard boxes every month.

My issue is not really with cardboard consumption — which has actually decreased slightly since the dawn of e-commerce. Sure, it would be great if we reduced our use of boxes, but I just want to know where I should put them in the meantime.

Back in the time before online shopping, products were sent in boxes to stores and taken back home in their nude, box-less state. Cardboard disposal was a commercial endeavor, zoned to retail and industrial spaces with specialized dumpsters and cardboard compactors. (Still true in our remaining brick-and-mortar stores.)

But now, much of this refuse ends up in our homes, creating a personal waste management problem for those of us without garages or even closets. As someone who tries to keep a clean house, the boxes are a literal stumbling block.         

I’ve tried to start taking the boxes out more often, but this isn’t really a tenable solution. Flattened boxes are cumbersome, and carrying more than one demands two hands. I find the whole process so needlessly involved, but even if it weren’t, that wouldn’t solve my problem: The trash room in my building is an outdoor alley, with five large trash cans, each measuring 22-inches in diameter. The flattened boxes do not fit inside these cans, so my super has requested that we use the bookend method to wedge our box trash up against the wall. With 20+ tenants, this isn’t enough space. Sometimes I hear him yelling out the window as he tries to arrange our incorrigible trash.  

For a while I wondered if maybe I was dumb and had somehow neglected a basic life skill that would help make box disposal run more smoothly. I asked a few friends how they manage this trash, and most said, much like me, they just deal. My one friend Sally ties her boxes with twine, because that’s what her landlord told her to do.

“But where do you put them when you bring them to the trash room?”

“The twine doesn’t solve that part of the problem.”

The online advice about cardboard disposal all seems to cater to people who just moved. If you unpack your house and you have a ton of boxes, you can sign up for U-Haul’s Box Exchange program, which pairs you with someone else who needs boxes. This is cool, but it’s probably excessive for someone with three to ten boxes each week. The same goes for listing boxes on Craigslist, or giving them away to a neighbor on NextDoor.

My problem could be solved by a compactor or a dumpster, but these things are expensive and take up too much space. I emailed all the major trash can suppliers, asking if any had plans to sell a product that dealt with the influx of cardboard at home. The only one that replied was SimpleHuman, with the suggestion that I consider a large commercial can. These cans are stunning, but unfortunately the widest has an aperture of only 20.7 inches. This might accommodate your average flattened shoebox, but probably not a standard Amazon box.

Really, the issue I’m dealing with is that trash is no longer the shape of the trash can. The product I think I wish they’d invent looks more like a five-foot magazine file that holds the upright cardboard in place. To think even further outside the bin, I got in touch with Matt Dingee, a graduate of Michigan State University’s School of Packaging and the co-founder of OnPoint2020, a leading packaging consulting firm. Matt understood my problem very clearly:

“The corrugate industry has grown significantly in the last couple of years, largely due to eCommerce, and all the delivery corrugate.” (Corrugate is what the packaging elite call the kind of cardboard with a fluted, zig-zag edge.) “It is transferring some [of the boxes] from traditional stores to consumers who get things delivered directly to their houses.”

Instead of trying to build a better trash can, Matt pointed me toward some new packaging concepts, including a reusable shipping envelope that gets returned to retailers, much like the glass Coke bottles of the past. One such envelope, from LimeLoop, repurposes waterproof vinyl from billboards, reducing waste from two different industries. Solutions like these depend on retailers themselves, who aren’t always willing to take the risk of asking customers to adapt to new behavior.

“I think the consumer is ready,” Matt said. “The company that can figure out an elegant way to do it — one that’s not too obstructive, but also it gives the consumer a part in solving the problem — is gonna be way ahead of everybody else.”

Until then, it seems that our likeliest solution is to keep wedging stacks of flattened boxes into the slots between our trash cans and our walls. The alternative, of course, is to give up online shopping — an innovative change that could stem the flow of boxes, stop the abuse of warehouse workers, reduce the carbon footprint of shipping transportation, and slay the unchecked corporate beast that continues to take all our money and our data.

I wish I could believe that we have that self-restraint.

Sophie Bernstein had Rainbow flip-flops, Tiffany earrings, and superpowers. She could blow out her hair to a smooth brunette sheen without any frizz or her arm getting tired. She shaved every day with a pink Venus razor that left white flares of light down her smooth, hairless shins.

We were 12, going on 13 — or at least she was. I was just the regular 12. It wasn’t a crush I had, but something more Talmudic. Over six years at sleepaway camp, she taught me the connotations of nouns — Victoria’s Secret, Atlantis Resort, all the different tri-state suburbs. Our friendship felt more sacred than my own bat mitzvah would.

Our bunk at camp was a clapboard cabin with two rows of cots and tall wooden cubbies. My own cubby shelves were an unrepentant mess, prone to rejecting the tank tops and shorts that my mother had written my name in with Sharpie. Sophie — not her real name — always passed inspection. On top of her cubbies, she had a bottle of Woolite, for her delicates. Below, she kept a trove of folded pastels, claimed in her name with iron-on tags.

Sophie had no fewer than seven Juicy Couture sweatsuits: seven terry jackets and seven matching pairs of pants, inscribed on the seat with an all-caps JUICY. She wore them to special events, like camp dances, zipped with a half-inch of midriff exposed and the nickel “J” of the zipper pull supporting the shelf of her much-discussed boobs. I had boobs and a midriff too, but they looked less assured in my Old Navy dresses.

Sometimes Sophie lent me her clothes, but even then, I just felt off. She had fluent femininity, the passive grace of a native speaker. I was trying to learn the rules by rote. It was only years later, when I’d finally failed, that I came to realize, “That girl was such a JAP!”

The Jewish American Princess, or JAP, embodies both an attitude and a style of dressing. The archetype was forged in the mid-1950s, in concert with the Jewish-American middle-class ascent. Where it came from, nobody knows. The JAP has survived through an alliance with pop culture — showing her face sporadically in books, in music, and onscreen, even up to the present.

The JAP is neither Jewish nor American alone. She makes herself known where these identities collide in a calamity of Coach bags, upmarket loungewear, and entitled dispositions toward luxury and ease. For Jewish American girls in Jewish American places — summer camps, Hebrew schools, the suburbs of New Jersey — her image sets forth a list of inelastic rules, a predetermined path through the dark of adolescence into the flames of female Jewish life. She is at once a real identity marker and an imagined stereotype. Like most cultural constructs that tell women how to be, her image can be freeing and oppressive at the same time.

As a philosophy, JAP style prioritizes grooming, trepidatious trendiness, and comfort. In any given season, the components of the look are drawn from a subset of mainstream fashion trends. “She buys in multiples (almost hysterically in multiples),” wrote Julie Baumgold in a 1971 New York magazine op-ed. “She has safe tastes, choosing an item like shorts when it is peaking.” JAP style is less concerned with capital-F fashion than it is with simply replicating itself.

Starting in the 1950s, JAPs favored “caches of cashmere and charm bracelets and pleated shirts and Pappagallos to match,” writes Baumgold. By the ’80s, according to The Official J.A.P. Handbook, they’d moved on to inside-out mauve sweatshirts, leather hobo bags, and Calvin Klein jeans. Broadly speaking, across time and generations, JAPs favor loungewear and matchy-matchy sets. They wear low-maintenance clothes in high-maintenance ways, draping themselves in elevated basics, and raising them further with flat-ironed hair and workaday pieces from luxury brands (think: nylon Prada backpacks and Cartier Love bangles).

Like all the most successful slurs, the term embodies both descriptive power and judgment. (The word bears no relation to the anti-Japanese slur.) When JAP is utilized in its Jew-on-Jew sense — by leaps and bounds its most common application — it can serve as a means of impartial description, as well as a tool for policing other Jews. (See: “White ripped denim is the JAP look of the moment” versus “We bought a house in Westchester because Long Island was such an unbearable JAP scene!”)

If one ever self-identifies as a JAP, it is usually only temporarily, or in jest. (Filling a cart with $30 Kérastase shampoo: “Oh, my god, I’m such a JAP!”)

JAP is rarely used outside the Jewish world — only by goyim in very Jewish cities, and usually playfully so. A second-degree ethnic slur, it is far too acute to be useful in places where people don’t know many actual Jews. On those milk-and-meat main streets, Jews don’t have midlevel designer handbags or custom window treatments; they have horns. There, the top-level pejorative is “Jew.”

Still, to endeavor to write about the JAP feels, in some way, like a risky proposition — a boon to the rising class of anti-Semites and their claims about “globalist Jews” and Jewish money. Why pick now to salt an old wound? But the JAP, as a figure, is a paragon of nuance, as complex as the Jewishness and womanhood she draws from.

At worst, she is the dybbuk of the upwardly mobile, the ever-haunting spirit of the Jewish nouveau riche as it tries to find its place in the American class system. At best, she performs her own kind of Jewish drag, reclaiming the anti-Semitic tropes of yore as a positive ideal of Jewish womanhood. I see her as a queen of multitudinous existence.

The history of the JAP is a story of success through failure. It begins outside the United States, with an unkind ferment of older stereotypes: the non-Christian other, the money-lending Shylock, the petty bourgeois European nebbish. Over the span of about 100 years, Ashkenazi Jews — Jews from Central and Eastern Europe, who comprise the vast majority of today’s global Jewish population — made their way to the United States, first with a wave of 19th-century migrants from German lands, then with the turn-of-the-century Eastern Europeans, then with those of the interwar period, and finally with the postwar Holocaust survivors.

Most of the Jews who came before World War II found themselves in working-class jobs, especially in the garment industry. In their spare time, like many other immigrant groups, they undertook the project of becoming white, shaping in the process their own funhouse vision of the American dream. This assimilation process involved Borscht Belt comedy, marinating chicken in dehydrated soup, and shipping upstate to the resorts of the Catskills to practice the habits of the American leisure class. (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel provides a particularly charismatic depiction of the age.)

My family history on my mom’s side follows this rough trajectory. My great-great-grandparents Elizabeth and Meyer Prager came to Philadelphia from Poland in the first decade of the 1900s. Meyer made a living selling papers from a newsstand at the corner of 13th and Market. Their daughter Jessie was born in 1916 and went on to marry Irving Buckrinsky, a teacher who changed his last name to Buck and soon after entered the real estate business.

My maternal grandmother was born in the early 1940s, under the same moon as a boom in pop culture, GI Bill funding for college educations, and a new designation called the “teenager.” She married the same year as her high school graduation and moved into an apartment in the Rhawnhurst part of Philly, paying $90 per month in rent, plus an extra $2.50 for the closet. My grandfather joined in the real estate business, just as waves of other Jews began to make their own white-collar ascents. Out of this tumult of class reorganization came a Jewish American mass culture.

The Jewish novelists of the midcentury — men like Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and J.D. Salinger — were stewards of a new Jewish American literary canon, replete with its own set of archetypes and tropes. The first was the Jewish mother figure. Consumed by her nagging, overbearing affectations, the Jewish mother was to blame for the persistent woes of the Jewish American male — his anxiety, his neuroticism, his own assimilation failures. Her image was designed to absorb the stigmas of the old world.

Her inverse, the JAP, was entitled and withholding, designed to take blame for the stigmas of the new. If the WASP still saw the Jewish man as nouveau riche — even after so much Americanization — then surely there must have been a third party to blame. The JAP was a woman who had overshot the mark, piling on the trappings of the stable middle class like so many diamond tennis bracelets. And so, as Eve was formed from Adam, yet another negative image of women was born from man’s insecurity about himself.  

Early written records of the JAP appear first in Herman Wouk’s 1955 novel Marjorie Morningstar, and then, more famously, in Philip Roth’s 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus. In Goodbye, Columbus, narrator Neil Klugman is a working-class Jew living with his aunt and uncle in Newark, New Jersey. He meets love interest Brenda Patimkin at the pool at Green Lane Country Club.

Patimkin, of tony, suburban Short Hills, is the nose-jobbed, Radcliffe-educated ideal of a Jewish American woman. Emotionally strategic and materially demanding, she leads a life of domesticated excess, indulging in all the “gold dinnerwear, sporting-goods trees, nectarines, garbage disposals, [and] bumpless noses” that daddy’s money can buy.

As she gets to know Klugman, she engages in sex to speed the transition from provided-for daughter to provided-for wife. Klugman, for his part, resents these expectations as much as he resents his inability to meet them.

Though Roth did not coin the phrase JAP, he did set the baseline from which she would evolve. In these early years, the JAP was first known as the Jewish Princess, or JP. Her existence said more about Jewish male insecurity than the actual inner lives of Jewish women.

In the eyes of men, she represented one thing; due to the inequities of cultural production, we don’t know much about what she meant to women. In any case, in this first iteration, the JAP was defined by her sexual manipulation and acquisitiveness. Depending on what you had and what she wanted, she might decide to put out, or not. This dynamic was explained by two nice Jewish boys on a 1970 episode of The David Susskind Show:

DAVID STEINBERG: Well, the JP is the daughter that’s been spoiled and brought up by the parents and they never quite get out of it, and they expect their husbands to cater to them in the same way that their mother and father did.

MEL BROOKS: It’s codified. If you meet a Jewish girl and you shake her hand, that’s dinner. You owe her a dinner. If you should take her home after dinner and rub around and kiss in the doorway, right. That’s already a small ring, a ruby or something. If, God forbid, anything filthy should happen amongst you, that’s marriage and the same grave. You’re buried together, screwed into the earth together. They do expect a lot for a little fooling around.      

A notable JAP of this formative age was the big-nosed, big-haired “Baby” Jane Holzer. A Warhol muse and the daughter of a Florida real estate investor, she described her look to Tom Wolfe as “just 1964 Jewish.”

The 1970s saw the rise of Barbra Streisand, a nasal-voiced, ugly-pretty icon for Jewish divas to come. By then, the public image of the JAP had expanded to include a full syndrome of tastes and behaviors. Sexual manipulation was eclipsed by an unfettered fetish for “daddy’s money,” or sometimes, the hubby’s credit card.

By the ’70s, Jews were well integrated into the wide-wale corduroy fabric of American suburban life. If not fully “white,” then at least they’d become white enough for white flight. My grandparents moved to a detached house in Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania, and stocked it with three kids, three Persian cats, and a live-in maid to rake the shag carpets. They bought a boat. Like many upper-middle-class women of the time, my grandmother didn’t work; now she works as a receptionist at an allergist’s office. As she puts it, “Before my divorce, I was a Jewish American Princess. Now I’m just regular Jewish.”

As Jews continued to move up the ladder, the schedule of Jewish life cycle events offered new opportunities for Manischewitz pissing contests. The bat mitzvah, a ritual transition to adulthood, quickly became its own ritual display of wealth, demanding hand-calligraphed invitations, passed hors d’oeuvres, disc jockeys, and multiple outfit changes for the bat mitzvah girl (and her mother).

On the one hand, these expenditures proclaimed success in the American class system. On the other, so much flagrant consumption amounted to a kind of cheap caricature. The JAP transcended her literary roots to claim a new place in the popular discourse. This rise is evidenced in the jokelore of the era:

How many JAPs does it take to change a light bulb? One to pour the Diet Pepsi, and one to call daddy.

What does a JAP make for dinner? Reservations.

What’s a JAP’s favorite position? Facing Neiman Marcus.

How do you know when a JAP has an orgasm? She drops her nail file.

The Official J.A.P Handbook by Anna Sequoia was published in 1982, a Semitic response to the wildly popular WASP liturgy known as The Official Preppy Handbook. The parody begins in a shtetl in Russo-Poland, where a Jewish mother dreams to herself, “Someday my daughters, and my daughters’ daughters, will wear Calvins, and live in a house with central air-conditioning.”

From there, the J.A.P. Handbook — which is marvelously and cheaply available on used book sites — presents a masterful birth-to-death exegesis on all things JAP, including JAP names (Rachel, Jamie), JAP colleges (American University), JAP pastimes (skiing, Quaaludes, going to the hairdresser), JAP illnesses (anorexia, dysmenorrhea), JAP hospitals (New York’s Mount Sinai), and, most importantly, JAP brands (Mercedes, Rolex, Fiorucci, Neiman Marcus, Filene’s, Paul Stuart, Calphalon, Cuisinart, K-Y, Rossignol, Adidas, Tic-Tac, and Harvard).

Toward the end of the decade, the JAP caught her biggest break yet in 1987’s Dirty Dancing — not as the Peace Corps-bound, corner-averse Baby, but rather her uptight sister Lisa Houseman. The following year, an article in the Washington Post detailed a spate of real-life “JAP-baiting” incidents. At the University of Maryland, an ad for housing had warned “NO JAPS.” At George Washington University, students were reprimanded for a talent show trivia sketch called “JAPoordy.”

The Jewish feminist magazine Lilith ran a special issue on the trend. In one analysis, writer Sherry Chayat describes the caricature of the JAP as pouting, complaining, cajoling, and manipulating, with an “oversized Benetton sweater” and “skinny pants tucked into bulky socks and high-top Reeboks.”

To explain why this look might be subject to disapproval, she cites a study from an academic journal on verbal abuse: “Like the gays and feminists, as long as they kept quiet, Jews were O.K. When Jews become more obvious, when they deviate from the ‘norm,’ they’re seen as obnoxious.” Such judgments, she noted, could be equally found in the mouths of Jewish and gentile haters.

Throughout these JAP debates of the late 1980s, my parents were students at George Washington University. My dad was a brother in the Jewish fraternity ZBT, and my mom rushed the sorority Sigma Delta Tau, which some joked stood for “Spending Daddy’s Trillions.” They met at a frat party and were married in 1990, in a taffeta-heavy wedding planned almost entirely by my (not-always-underbearing) grandmother. I was born on New Year’s Day 1992.

The first years of my life were spent in a new construction townhouse in Feasterville, Pennsylvania, a second-tier JAP suburb about 45 minutes from Philadelphia. The nearest first-tier JAP suburb, the unincorporated community of Holland, was only one zip code away. When my parents first went to look at the house, the agent had called the address Lower Holland. Only after the papers had been signed did they learn that “Lower Holland” was a made-up designation. Irrespective of this fact, our neighbors were still Jews.

Our house had been the developer’s model home and so came pre-furnished in the home decor of the day, which might best be described as Flashdance meets Washington Redskins-style racism. It was there, among the plaster cacti and the pink-and-mint urns of the American Southwest, that I celebrated my first few Hanukkahs. My brother was born in 1995 and circumcised in the living room, under an airbrushed painting of a Navajo woman. We went to temple preschool and day camp in the summer. I didn’t know anyone who celebrated Christmas.  

In her 1971 New York magazine op-ed, Julie Baumgold explains how the image of the JAP is enshrined through a pipeline of Jewish institutions. She describes Jewish life as a pinball game, a pleasant cycle of recapitulation, handed down with only minor variations:  

Once that princess pinball was whacked out of her slot, she hit the top of the board and tumbled down, hole to hole — the schools, the Houses of Worship, the Junior Holiday and Varieties, the Blind Dance, the camps, the tour of California, the tour to Europe, the college, the marriage, then — thwock — out comes a new princess-pinball and she drops into the last hole and people rub their eyes a few times at Riverside Memorial.

If we had not moved from that Feasterville house, I imagine my life might have followed this path. But in 1998, my mom got a new job teaching third grade in a barely Jewish farm town on the Delaware River. We moved into a new construction, single-family home on a cul de sac in Doylestown, Pennsylvania — a step in the direction of the upper middle class, but two steps back from Zion. Our new temple, with the heavy-handed name of Temple Judea, was a motley agglomeration of about 200 Jewish families, led into hostile territory by jobs at the nearby Merck corporate campus. In school, I could count the other Jews on one hand. There were never enough to sustain a JAP contingent.       

At age 8, I was sent off to sleepaway camp, where I roomed with a cabin of other Jewish girls. The Jewish camping movement is a hybrid outgrowth of a slew of Jewish cultural projects: urban social and moral reform, Zionist education, denominational training, and the general acculturation to American-style leisure. In modern times, these camps have come to serve as a stabilizing force in a diffuse diaspora, forging links between far-flung Jewish communities and facilitating a fun, if not aggressively gendered, form of Jewish socialization.

At camp, the infallible Sophie Bernstein and I spent hours straightening each other’s hair with a tool of totemic importance: the $200 Chi ceramic flat iron. (Burnt hair will always be the smell of adolescence.) There, I learned what a blow job was, how to do a smoky eye, and that one could only be counted as fat if one’s tummy stuck out farther than one’s boobs. For me, this folk knowledge brought both comfort and distress. At 12, I yearned to be any kind of normal. In those first failed experiments with femininity, JAP style offered an accessible script.  

Like the JAPs that came before, the JAPs I came to know in the mid-aughts preferred a semi-arbitrary assortment of normative status symbols: the Coach wristlet, the Tiffany heart tag bracelet, the Hard Tail or So Low fold-over pants, the Seven for All Mankind jeans. There were also camp-specific JAP artifacts, like Soffe gym shorts (pronounced “saw-fees”), Floatee flip-flops (made from pool-float material), and the Undeeband (a headband that was meant to resemble an underwear waistband).

For me, finding ways to obtain these items felt more like a matter of survival than self-expression. When at last I achieved the velour Juicy sweatsuit, it felt like a kind of teen enfranchisement. My sweatsuit was black, with the classic J-shaped zipper pull. Putting it on in front of the mirror, I admired the plane of my latke-flat ass, emblazoned with the oxymoronic phrase “Juicy.” In those early years of identity formation, Juicy held a space for my future sense of self.

With the ascendance of Juicy Couture, JAP style was finally dictating the mainstream. The brand was founded in 1997 by Pamela Skaist-Levy and Gela Nash-Taylor, two California Jews who were mythologized on their sweatsuits’ tags as simply “Pam and Gela.” At first, Juicy had one core product: the two-piece unit of leisurewear, which retailed for around $100 per piece. The outfit was beloved by Jews and goyim alike — notably Madonna, circa her studying Kabbalah (that is, Jewish mysticism) phase.

Like the image of the JAP herself, Juicy was both sexy and casually withholding. Later, the brand would release T-shirts, emblazoned with mall-rat empowerment slogans like “Juicy Couture for Nice Girls Who Like Stuff.” In some of these slogans, the word “Juicy” behaved as a kind of indirect synonym for Jewish, as in “Juicy American Princess,” or “Everyone Loves a Juicy Girl,” a take on the popular ethnic pride T-shirts of the time.

The first-wave JAPs had certainly been flashy, but Juicy Couture embodied these ideals with a tone of winking self-awareness. Leaving behind its faux pas past, nouveau riche had become a status symbol.

But like the Second Temple itself, all holy things must eventually turn to dust. By September of my seventh-grade year, Juicy Couture had begun to appear at discount stores like Saks Off Fifth. After eighth grade, I stopped going to camp and spent subsequent years leaving JAPdom behind, moving first toward an impossible mode of WASP beauty, then in the direction of agnostic subcultural fads like “indie” and “scene.”

This is not the case for every JAP. Adult JAPs are found in all realms — real estate, dermatology, law, child-rearing. New JAPs enter the world every day.

In 2014, Juicy Couture began to shutter its retail outlets. That was the year I graduated college and started to embrace other Jewish ideals: the 19th-century Freudian neurotic; the effete coastal homosexual; the communist, reptilian enemy of the state. Those experiments continue, in some form, to this day.

Yiddish has the phrase shanda fur die goyim to describe a Jew who misbehaves in places and ways that gentiles can see. Somehow foreign words make space for the tangled-up parts of diaspora living. But JAP is a tiny American coinage, a kind of linguistic Coach wristlet, if you will. For its relative size, it holds quite a lot: millennia of persecution, centuries of adaptation, the whole of the Western sexist tradition, and a landfill somewhere, filled with velour.

Special thanks to Riv-Ellen Prell, former director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Jewish Studies and professor emerita of American studies.

Moriah Robinson knew exactly what kind of engagement ring she wanted: a silver double halo with a diamond at the center. She was 20; her boyfriend was 21. Technically, they’d gone to high school together, but they didn’t really meet until after graduation, when they both went to college in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Their real, official meet-cute happened at a dance, which Moriah had attended as someone else’s date. Two years later, they were talking about marriage. The traditional ring would make everything feel official.  

“I went into the store, and I hated it on my finger,” Moriah remembers. “It was this gorgeous diamond ring that I had seen all over the place, and it was so stunning, but I was like, ‘Well, crap.’”

That night, she combed through Pinterest and Google, looking at pictures of “unique engagement rings.” There, she came across morganite, the light pink stone she’d eventually receive. Morganite is a variety of beryl, a clear mineral that forms in hexagonal crystals. Its other varieties include emerald (green beryl) and aquamarine (light blue beryl).   

Morganite can range from pale pink to coral. It was discovered in Madagascar in 1910 by George F. Kunz, the chief gemologist at Tiffany & Co. and the personal gemologist of banker J.P. Morgan. Morgan was an avid gem collector; Kunz named the new pink stone in his honor. Today, morganite is available from sellers on Etsy and from midmarket jewelers like Kay and Zales. According to a 2017 engagement ring survey by the Knot, it’s the second most popular non-diamond stone, after sapphire.

On a dollar-per-carat basis, morganites are much less expensive than diamonds. A single carat costs about $300, compared to $2,000 or more for a diamond. In 2002, Ben Affleck proposed to Jennifer Lopez with a 6.1-carat pink diamond ring that reportedly cost $2.5 million. The same size ring, in morganite, is on sale for about $1,799 on Etsy. At this price, even a budget-conscious couple can afford to make a show on social media if they want.

Moriah found her ring on SamNSue, a web-based jeweler that sells morganite, moissanite, aquamarine, and sapphire engagement rings, in addition to regular diamonds. She was drawn to a simple, traditional setting to offset the nontraditional pink stone. When she showed the ring idea to her boyfriend, he was worried it wouldn’t be durable enough. (Morganite is slightly softer than diamond.) The rest of her family was skeptical too. “My parents were like, ‘I think it’s a horrible idea,’” Moriah said. “They definitely all had to kind of be talked out of the idea of a diamond. Society kind of says that diamonds are the way to go.”

Who says an engagement ring needs to have a diamond?

Though diamonds may be naturally occurring, their precious image is entirely man-made. Back in 1888, when diamond mines were so prolific that diamonds were actually declining in price, diamond mining interests banded together and formed De Beers Consolidated Mines, a cartel to control the gem’s supply and reputation. At the height of this arrangement, in the 20th century, De Beers controlled most of the world’s diamond supply and kept prices high by keeping supply low. Not only did it succeed in rationing the stone, but they it enshrined the diamond’s reputation as prized.

As Edward Jay Epstein wrote in 1982, in his incredible profile of the diamond cartel, “The diamond invention is far more than a monopoly for fixing diamond prices; it is a mechanism for converting tiny crystals of carbon into universally recognized tokens of wealth, power, and romance.”  

In 1938, De Beers sent a special envoy to New York to meet with the president of N.W. Ayer, a leading ad agency of the era. Their goal was to forge a new image for the diamond as an integral part of marriage and courtship. At that time, most Americans who bought diamonds bought tiny, inexpensive stones. The campaign goal was to sell the illusion that a larger diamond was inherently a greater expression of love. “We are dealing with a problem in mass psychology,” concluded a 1947 strategy plan.

Ayer enlisted the stars of screen and stage to model new diamond-buying habits for the masses. Tabloids began to cover the size and price of celebrity rings, implying that “bigger” equated to “more love.”

That year saw the launch of “A Diamond Is Forever,” the campaign slogan so deeply ingrained that it now reads more like folk wisdom than ad copy. By equating diamonds with eternity, De Beers hoped to get ahead of a looming crisis. By 1986, there would be more than 500 million carats of “used” diamonds in circulation — a testament to the cartel’s success, but more than 50 times the number of “new” diamonds being taken out of mines.

By making diamonds seem so precious, De Beers had created its own competition — a horde of independent diamond owners that might resell their rings at any time, flooding the market with too much supply and thereby lowering prices. “A Diamond Is Forever” aimed to combat this crisis by asserting the romantic value of diamonds, but also their status as unsellable heirlooms. For years, the biggest threat to the diamond was the fear of too many diamonds for sale.

Has the diamond met its competition?

Today, however, the biggest threat to diamonds might be brides like Moriah who are increasingly willing to consider other stones. This year saw a spate of millennial-panic pieces warning that a diamond might not be forever. “Polished diamonds were one of the worst performing commodities in 2017, with the gem’s reputation tarnished by fakes and stones mined in conflict zones,” wrote Bei Hu in a piece for Bloomberg called “Millennials Are Snubbing Diamonds.” Other writers contested this prognosis, including one who suggested that “self-gifting” would save the diamond’s failing reputation.  

As consumers continue to think about ethics as part of the overall branding of a product, the specter of the “blood diamond,” mined by child labor, is an image the industry will have to overcome. While diamond alternatives are not always “conflict-free,” at least they don’t suggest the same historical baggage. This is an advantage from a marketing perspective as couples seek rings more reflective of their values.  

Still, among millennial and Gen Z brides, the diamond remains the most desired stone, even as De Beers concedes it might be out of reach. “Most of these youngest consumers have yet to reach the level of affluence that will allow them to increase their active interest in diamonds,” said the 2018 Diamond Insight Report.

As middle-class stability becomes less assured, and new social norms challenge age-old wedding dogmas, both brides and businesses are betting on alternatives. In 2016, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway bought Gemvara, a jewelry startup that carries conflict-free diamonds but also diamond alternatives like moissanite, sapphire, emerald, and ruby. Brilliant Earth, a San Francisco-based online jeweler, carries lab-grown diamonds, recycled precious metals, and gemstones like sapphire, aquamarine, moissanite, and morganite.       

“While diamonds are still the most popular gemstone used in engagement rings, other gemstones, including morganite, are becoming increasingly sought after,” says Brilliant Earth co-founder and co-CEO Beth Gerstein. “We continue to see an increasing interest in pink engagement rings following the rise of millennial pink in 2017.”  

Right now, the main concern surrounding morganite seems to be its unknown cultural status. Diamond imitators like cubic zirconia have long been judged low-class or second-rate; a Google search for “morganite” yields the recommended query, “Is morganite tacky?” On the Knot, one bride recounts, in tears, returning her ring because morganite didn’t “feel bridal” enough. On a WeddingBee discussion board, another writes, “I can hear my mum and mother-in-law saying it’s tacky and looks fake.”

In geological terms, morganites are actually rarer than diamonds. Their price stems not from cheapening abundance but rather from recent and limited demand. Still, we know that matters of taste are not known to adhere to petty things like logic. Weddings especially, as family events, are subject to the dogmas of multiple generations. In the face of 100 years of diamond branding, morganite still has a lot to overcome.    

In Moriah’s case, her family and now-husband eventually came around. The morganite she chose was actually smaller than what they could afford. “You can get a huge stone — I mean, massive! — for $3,000.” In the end, the affordable price allowed her to have the exact ring she wanted. When it finally arrived, in its tiny leather box, her family declared, “Well that’s the most beautiful stone we’ve ever seen!”

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“Flip sequins,” also known as reversible sequins, are a color-changing fabric that’s been everywhere of late, courting the gaze of the glitz-prone tween shopper. At Justice, one can buy a flip-sequin pillow, emblazoned with dual-toned GIRL POWER text. At Sears, a shirt with a smiling Elsa reveals a flip-sequin Anna when brushed.

Enter any elementary school today and you’ll find dozens of glittering kids, smoothing the grain of their flip-sequin shirts. The fabric merges the pleasure of touch with the unrestrained glamour of childhood taste and the rapid innovation of an Alibaba world. In the United States, the search term picked up steam in late 2016, increasing 100 percent between Christmas 2016 and 2017.

“I think it’s lovely,” says Livia Labate, parent of a 5-and-a-half-year-old daughter. “Marketers focus, to an excess, on how kids respond positively to contrast and vibrant tones. However, kids are constantly touching things! These sequin fabrics give them a sensory experience beyond color. It is unsurprising to me that they find it delightful.”

Sequins have always been a site of innovation. The very first sequins were coins, sewn into clothes for safekeeping. (The word “sequin” comes from the Arabic word “sikka,” meaning coin.)

Up through the early 1900s, sequined clothing was heavy and expensive, made from flattened discs of real metal. The true democratization of glitz would not begin until the early 1920s, when European designers began to experiment with electroplated gelatin embellishments. (These first Jell-O sequins often melted under spotlights.)

The materials processing revolution of the midcentury led to an age of more durable sequins. By the ’30s, the Eastman Kodak company was producing sequins using the same acetate it used to make its photographic film. Twenty years later, the invention of Mylar would lead to the first machine-washable sequin. Today’s sequins are made from vinyl plastic, which may or may not be recyclable. These newer sequins are lighter and cheaper, useful for eveningwear or everyday attire.

The first description of flip sequins appeared a 2011 Chinese patent for a “moveable sequin embroidery composite structure.” The application described a means of threading sequins in a reversible, overlapping arrangement: “User can randomly stir the sequins according to the likes and dislikes of the user to form different patterns by the sequin groups, so that clothes are bright, changeful, fashionable, and attractive.”  

It took about five years for the bright, changeful fabric to find the right audience in the United States. Today, major tween retailers like Justice, Claire’s, and the Children’s Place all have special flip-sequin sections of their websites. There is seemingly no limit to the fabric’s application. One can recline on a flip-sequin pillow while wearing a pair of flip-sequin pajamas and lounging around with a flip-sequin throw.   

“We’ve been selling products with flip sequins for two years now,” says Emily Reichert, senior marketing strategy specialist for Justice. “Our girls love that they are super sparkly, come in their favorite themes and characters, and are very tactile. Fun to play with!”    

“My daughter has sensory issues, so we love them,” says Heather Savatta, parent of a 4-year-old. “They are cute and fun and keep her busy. She is so obsessed with this shirt that I had to try and find more!”

Flip-sequin products are available online, but their true allure can only be felt by smoothing the two-faced scales for yourself. (For those who can’t make it out to literally any store, there are thousands of flip-sequin videos on YouTube.) The pleasure of touching a flip-sequin product is the pleasure of restoring chaos without effort; even the most disjointed image can quickly return to its orderly form with just a gentle brush of the hand. Like brushing a suede sofa cushion, only better, flip sequins offer a glamorous distraction.  

“I think the novelty wears off after the first day of wearing it,” says Philip Shemella, parent of a 7-year-old daughter. “Then the scales are mostly randomly oriented.”

Like other trends of recent years — fidget spinners, hoverboards — the flip-sequin trend will soon fizzle out, giving way to some new iteration of plastic. Already, it seems, the fad is declining.

“It’s not as much this year as last year,” says Josh Herren, a third-grade teacher at a “smallish progressive private school” in Pennsylvania. “It’s certainly not as big as fidget spinners, or flossing, or slime.”  

Adults who find themselves behind the times should consider investing in a flip-sequin portrait, a product now widely available on Etsy. As mediums go, the bidirectional grain is perfect for expressing the duality of man.

Depending on what kind of anxiety you have, doomsday is either far away or just around the corner. Whether it’s the class war, the race war, the rising tide, or the total collapse of civilization, we’ll all need food and water when it comes.

Doomsday prepping is an American invention, born from the nuclear panics of the 1950s. (Before that, survivalism was just called surviving.) Doomsday preppers stock up on the basics, often in accordance with the so-called “Rule of Threes,” which holds that a person in a crisis can survive for three minutes without air, three hours without shelter, three days without water, three weeks without food, and three months without security.

Prepping is a long-term, thoughtful kind of hoarding. It’s inverse, Black Friday, is fast, cheap, and fun — way down at the end of the stocking-up spectrum. This retail tradition evokes its own doomsday: bodies trampled by doorbuster deals, overworked and exploited low-wage workers, families trying to make ends meet.

One might argue that the holiday’s existence is a symptom of an economic system on the brink. Then again, one might use its great sales to load up on necessary items for the end times. I spoke to five people in the prepping business about what they’re hoping to pick up this weekend. (Quotes have been edited and condensed.)

Nate, a.k.a. “The Canadian Prepper”
Founder of CanadianPreparedness.com

What are you hoping to buy on sale this weekend, prepping-related or otherwise?
Personally, nothing. I have literally everything a prepper could want.

On a shopping weekend as wild as this, how does one decide what is actually worth buying?
I’d say nonperishables, ammo, first-aid supplies with no expiration dates — things which probably are not on sale. You can’t eat cheap TVs!

What are three items a non-prepper could buy to be at least a little more prepared?
Mylar bags and oxygen absorbers will allow you to preserve many staple grains — rice, beans, and flour — for 30-plus years. Titan Survivorcord is a paracord that includes fishing line, snare wire, and a strand of jute twine infused with wax, for fire-starting. The Inergy Kodiak power generator is one of the most advanced lithium power generators on the market.

Do some preppers get caught up in buying gadgets?
Of course. Our society is driven by rampant materialism, and prepping is no exception. The only difference is a $2,000 generator is more functional than brand-name clothing.

Scott Huntington
Writer, Off the Grid

What are you hoping to buy on sale this weekend?
A tarp. For actual survival, a generic blue tarp from Lowe’s isn’t going to cut it. I’m looking for something that is specially designed to help you survive in winter, like [the Xenon winter tarp, $140 and the Old Man Winter by Wilderness Logistics, $160]. They can be used as a tent, as ground cover, to catch rainwater, to patch holes, for a trap, and even to drag back heavy animals.

What is something basic non-preppers should buy?
A good flashlight. I recently was gifted this Flateye LED flashlight, and it’s like holding a car headlight in your hand. Not only can it light up the world around you, but you can use it to blind attackers or signal SOS.

How do you decide what kinds of things are actually worth buying?
If people are deciding between two items, I always tell them to get the thing that’s more versatile. For example, you can use an air compressor to skin a deer, or set up an AR-15 to hunt deer.

Where are the amazing Black Friday deals?
There are plenty of lists out there like this that have good deals for preppers. My advice would be to go to Reddit’s r/preppers on Black Friday itself. People will be posting deals that you’re unlikely to see anywhere else.  

Survivor Jane
Host of Prepper Camp, the nation’s largest three-day prepper event

What are you hoping to buy on sale this weekend?
Prepping is more about planning, knowledge, and skills than actually purchasing a lot of useless gadgets. I walked away from the consumer lifestyle many years ago and now live on an off-grid homestead. That said, there are always items that preparedness-minded people, like myself, keep their eyes open for. We are always looking for good deals on all things canning, such as jars, lids, pressure canners, and water bath canners. Or perhaps a higher-ticket item, such as a food dehydrator.

What would you tell a non-prepper to buy?
Because water is the most important of your basic survival needs, I’d suggest a means of purification. We all are different, and preparedness is not one size fits all. This item could be tablets you drop into a gallon of water, all the way up to a contraption you put into a pond and drink from.

What’s the coolest prepper gadget you’ve seen?
Manufacturers are always coming out with the latest, greatest gadget. I think we all are consumers at heart, preppers and non-preppers alike. I’m past the consumer phase, even though I’ve been known to drool from time to time. If money were no object, I’d love to see a freeze dryer under my tree.

Daisy Luther
Founder, the Organic Prepper

What are you hoping to buy this weekend?
I will be looking at freeze-dried fruits and veggies. Just because there’s an emergency going on, that doesn’t mean I won’t want to give my family balanced nutrition.

What are silliest things you’ve seen other preppers buy?  
Tactical gear like bulletproof vests, or far more guns than they actually need. It’s really great to be armed and prepared to protect yourself if someone breaks in, but you can’t shoot 10 guns at a time.

What should people stockpile instead?
Water is an absolutely enormous gap in a lot of preps, because who wants to go buy a whole bunch of 1-gallon jugs of water? Imagine spending $200 and all you’ve got is that stupid water. It’s not sexy, but you’re gonna use it. Water is actually a really good investment.

Do you see yourself as prepping for a specific kind of incident, or are you just trying to be prepared in general?  
The No. 1 emergency that most people are going to face is a financial problem, and that isn’t necessarily gonna be the collapse of the American economy. It’s more likely that someone in your family will lose their job, or you’ll have a huge medical expense that you weren’t expecting and can’t pay for. I’m a single parent. About 10 years ago, I lost my job. The fact that my pantry had enough food for several months meant I was able to use my savings and my unemployment payment to keep my mortgage paid.

Jeff, “The Berkey Guy”
Berkey Water Filter Sales, Directive21.com

How is your company thinking about Black Friday this year? Are you running any specials?
Yes, but people are thinking more about having a good water filter on their kitchen counter than they’re thinking, “Oh, my gosh, the world’s economy is gonna collapse!” Usually the water filter industry is fear-based, or caution-based, or prepping-based. Right now it’s just mainstream interest. But yeah, we’re having specials. People will buy.

You’re saying business is up in the prepper industry?
No! They’re buying less! Way, way less. The market is way different. If Hillary would’ve got elected, then it would’ve been completely different for our market — more guns, more bullets, more everything. It would’ve continued what was going on during Obama, for sure. But now people are happy and comfortable. It’s not that they aren’t buying; they’re just buying when they want to have purified water at home.

It’s interesting you say that, because I’m in New York City, and I find that people on the left are very unhappy and uncomfortable.
I totally agree with you. I’m not saying this to be negative toward either side, but the left doesn’t put their money into it. I know there is a lot of fear on that side, but they just don’t buy like the other end of the spectrum does.

So you’re not anticipating a huge influx of sales?
We have our core. They’ll buy. Cyber Monday is usually the big day for us, but it’s not as huge as you might think. It’s not like Amazon, you know what I mean? When the weekend is over, they’ll do over $10 billion or something. They’re so huge now! But yeah, there have always been ups and downs, business cycles. If we get a Democrat in 2020, business will pick up for us tremendously.

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