Small, downtown novelty stores don’t usually last 20 years, but Heebe Jeebe General Store is not your usual small, downtown novelty store.

Engaging the community—particularly children—in creative, fun ways is a top priority for Drew Washer, owner of the Petaluma novelty and gift shop, known locally as Heebe Jeebe (pronounced HEE-bee JEE-bee). Over the years the store has included an art gallery, a photo booth, a Day of the Dead town altar, pop-up Halloween stores, a shop dog named Rheya and the beloved Champion, a mechanical ride-on horse for kids.

“Those things have been the most rewarding parts of the store for me,” Washer says. “It’s kept it fresh and lively.”

Embracing entire families was important to Washer from the store’s inception.

“I wanted it to be active, fun and entertaining, not just shopping,” she says. “I wanted little kids to be able to buy things with their own money and have a place that kids, moms, grandmas and grandpas could all come—even a man could shop here and get a kick out of it so he didn’t have to wait outside.”

When Washer opened the store in 1999, she was a designer in San Francisco for fashion-juggernaut Esprit. She also had her own kids’ clothing line, Kid Poets. Washer later stopped commuting to the city because she wanted to be around for her school-age kids, Phoebe and Henry.

With no experience and a location that, at the time, wasn’t great, she opened Heebe Jeebe in a space half the size of the current store and stocked it with fun toys, gifts, and novelty items. In the past two decades, it’s become a beloved local establishment.

“It was the right time and the right vibe,” Washer says. “I’ve always loved novelty stores—surprises and humor are uplifting.”

Originally called Boomerang and later named the Back House Gallery, the art gallery at the back of the store showcased local art.

“The art gallery was all about community-inspired art,” Washer says. “I knew lots of artists—and I knew lots of artists who were now professionals who didn’t get to do their art as much, so it was a chance for them to do one painting and have it be shown.”

Of course, children were always included, even in the art gallery.

“A child’s art could be right alongside an adult’s art in the gallery,” she says.

At Halloween, for many years, Washer hosted pop-up Halloween stores. Often, she rented an extra location for the month and stocked a huge selection of costumes, wigs—anything you needed for Halloween.

With the advent of the big-box Halloween stores, however, she scaled back to a smaller, dedicated section in Heebe Jeebe. Her inspiration for the Halloween store? The store’s former tenant, The Pet Stop, in addition to selling pets, had a Halloween novelty section. A row of crazy rubber masks on the top shelf was a constant presence, and you could rent costumes or find colored hair spray—a rarity in the ’80s and ’90s.

“I wanted to carry on that lineage,” Washer says, looking up at her own top shelf of crazy rubber masks, carried year-round.

While Halloween is big for Washer, so is Day of the Dead. “Day of the Dead changed my life,” she says. “I did it at first as an extension of the gallery, because I love the culture and art of Mexico and Central America.”

In 2001, Washer and her husband, artist Jack Haye, created an altar in the hallway next to the shop as part of the city’s annual Day of the Dead festivities. People brought photos of their deceased loved ones and wrote messages to them.

“It became an extension of the gallery,” she says. “It was a good place to have an altar because it was accessible to people without the store being open. Every year people would bring new people and bring back previous people and tell me stories about them. I got to know the community in a way that is very personal … and then when I had loss, they did the altar that year.”

Washer’s daughter Phoebe passed away in 2008 and she explains how the altar and the community helped comfort her during that time.

“The altar is for a community of people who have died,” she says. “It’s not just for the people visiting it, it’s also for the people who have passed on. They’re not alone; they are with others—that was comforting.”

The store has always been reciprocal in nature.

“It has really reached out to different aspects of the town that you don’t usually think about with a store,” Washer says. “When Phoebe died, I had customers come in and take over for a while, working for free. I’ve definitely been on the giving and receiving sides.”

Washer began the store on a credit card and her friends pitched in.

“I was naive, and because my budget was small, my mistakes were small,” she says. Her shop is still flexible and responsive today. “It changes with the community.”

After 20 years, Petaluma remains a family town, and her original family-oriented vision still applies, although the products which include humor cards, home decor, gifts, toys, novelty items and more, continue to shift with the current culture.

To celebrate Heebe Jeebe’s big anniversary, every customer will receive a special gift with purchase until they run out.

Washer explains her 20-year success as, “When you stay open to the community, your store becomes a reflection of them.”
Heebe Jeebe General Store is located at 46 Kentucky St., Petaluma, CA. 707.773.3222 facebook.com/HeebeJeebe

When my son was younger, he loved Charlie Brown and the woebegone world he inhabits. He liked jazz (courtesy of Vince Guaraldi) and he liked the fact the characters play baseball. The only cultural connective tissue I can draw between jazz and baseball is Ken Burns and his documentaries, Jazz and Baseball. If the Peanuts characters became Civil War reenactors, the kid would probably grow to believe Ken Burns and Charles Schultz were his real parents. That’s fine—they can pay for his college.

There there’s the A Charlie Brown Christmas app. It’s a quaint repurposing the source material that features some modest interactivity while flawlessly capturing the signature melancholic vibe. My kid loved the iOS version until Charlie and Linus’ arms came off.
It was a glitch but imagine trying to explain that to a horrified child. Good grief, indeed.

Later, we pored through a “Look and Find” book entitled Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown that takes scenes from A Charlie Brown Christmas with random objects thrown in (a stuffed camel, a maraca, a pipe—basically the decor of the average freshman dorm), intended for young readers to find. Seeing the kaleidoscopic holiday landscapes of the Peanuts characters’ otherwise humdrum world in static, printed form makes apparent just how psychedelic they were.

In fact, the expressions of Linus and Charlie Brown look like the precise moment they realized, “Maybe we shouldn’t have dropped that acid, Charlie Brown.” This also accounts for how Charlie ended up with such a famously crap tree. He was trippin’ balls. In fact, LSD explains a lot of the Peanuts world—from hallucinatory flashbacks of World War II (featuring trippy rotoscoped footage of D-Day reminiscent of Yellow Submarine) to kite-eating trees and Linus’ Syd Barrett-style burnout fixation on a mythical pumpkin.

Rumor is if you turn down the sound on A Charlie Brown Christmas and play the second side of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon simultaneously, the Brain Damage track comes on just when Charlie Brown takes his totally f’d-up Christmas tree out into the winter night.

“The lunatic is on the grass” syncs wonderfully with the image of a dazed-and-confused Chuck carrying around his ailing green plant. Naturally, his eyes are big, black pupils when he stops to watch the surreal light display on Snoopy’s doghouse, then bails, disconsolate over his comparatively shabby tree. That’s when his hippy-ass pals show up, wave their arms around (“You rearrange me ’til I’m sane”) and suddenly the twig Charlie Brown ditched becomes a proper Christmas tree. Evidently, everyone is high. The kids start caroling in time with the backing vocals on the chorus. All true. Ken Burns is doing a documentary on it. It’s a holiday treat one can cherish every year (for about 8 hours at 500 micrograms).

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer blares over the loudspeaker as I wade through a sea of Christmas trees and Frosty the Snowman figurines. A store clerk leads me to a shelf of scented cinnamon tapers, but the candles I’m looking for are for lighting my menorah, a candelabrum used by Jews for more than 2,000 years.

“Did you try the garden center?” he suggests with a shrug.

Another clerk directs me to the ethnic-foods aisle packed with matzos and gefilte fish—staple foods for Pesach (Passover), a springtime holiday. I’m ready to call it quits on my detective work when I discover an entire table of Hanukkah merchandise. Here are window decals of dreidels, cookie cutters shaped in the Star of David and plastic plug-in menorahs made in China. There’s even KosherLand, a Jewish-themed board game modeled after Candy Land, with Marching Latkes taking the place of Lord Licorice.

Tossing aside bags of gold-wrapped gelt, or chocolate coins, I hit the jackpot with boxes of blues-and-whites. The candles are half-price—but the eight-night Festival of Lights hasn’t even begun.

Every year a similar scenario unfolds. Of the 19 local stores I once surveyed, only 10 sold Hanukkah candles. Meanwhile, Santa’s surplus overwhelms shoppers as early as Halloween—a confirmation of Yuletide’s prominence during the so-called Holiday Season.

I shouldn’t be surprised by the scanty representation. According to a 2018 commissioned report by the Jewish Community Federation, the North Bay (Sonoma, Napa, and Marin counties) comprises just 13 percent of the Bay Area’s Jewish population of 350,000. Might these statistics account for the paltry acknowledgement of my faith?

Hanukkah candles, sold as commodities, certainly look pretty displayed on a windowsill—similar to the twinkling lights on an evergreen. Yet they aren’t meant to be decorative. They’re symbolic. The flames stand as emblems of religious freedom, a remembrance of an ancient uprising against oppression.

Translated from the Hebrew as “dedication,” Hanukkah commemorates a successful revolt led by Judah the Maccabee in the second century B.C.E. As the tale of triumph is told, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the Hellenistic Greek king of the Seleucid Empire who ruled the Syrian throne, enforced brutal decrees that required Jewish worship of other deities. His armies ransacked the Second Temple in Jerusalem and stole its ritual objects, including Torah scrolls and a gold menorah. Upon repossessing and ritually cleansing the sanctuary, the Maccabees discovered what is now known as the miracle of Hanukkah: a vial of oil, enough to illuminate the eternal flame for only one day, lasted for eight.

It wasn’t the military coup or the miracle, but the candle-lighting ritual, that captivated me as a young child. I recall the warmth of my mother’s illumined face as she used the ninth “helper” candle, called a shammes, to ignite the others, then recited the blessings over them. Each night the number grew by one, until all eight shone in the darkness. Our family of four ate potato latkes cooked in oil. We played games of dreidel, gambling for gelt using the Hebrew letters on the four-sided spinning top, while the last flame flickered. The candles held the promise of returning light during the dimmest time of year.

By lighting the menorah, Jews perform a mitzvah, translated as a commandment or social obligation of communal value. The practice connects us to a Jewry of nearly 15 million worldwide. Kindling these oil lamps is a holy act.

Hanukkah, however, is not considered one of the high holy days; it holds far less religious significance than Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which mark the Jewish new year during the Days of Awe. So how was it elevated from a simple domestic ceremony to the most widely celebrated Jewish holiday?

Traditionally in Europe, parents would present tokens of money to children at Hanukkah. We added gift giving in the late 19th century, after Christmas became a federal U.S. holiday. Initially, the push to heighten Hanukkah was an effort “to resist assimilation to American culture so influenced by Christianity,” according to Dianne Ashton, a professor of religion studies at Rowan University, in her book Hanukkah in America: A History. Then, with the increase in post–World War II consumerism, Hanukkah followed suit with its embellished status: an “effective means of making [Jewish kids] immune against envy of the Christian children and their Christmas,” according to What Every Jewish Woman Should Know, a book published in 1941.

Growing up in the 1970s, my older brother and I wrapped homemade gifts for our parents—a macrame cup holder or hand-drawn coupon for a car wash. Each evening we opened a modest present until the eagerly anticipated final night, reserved for something more substantial like a baby doll or a model airplane kit.

“No fair!” a friend complained. “You get stuff for eight days and we only have one.”

While I knew that Santa did not exist, I found myself pining for what he delivered down her chimney. The pack of synthetic yarn ribbons I received, which frayed like my frizzy hair, could not compare to the Barbie Dreamhouse towering under her tree. Suddenly Hanukkah did not shine as brightly. My parents might have argued for its separate-but-equal status; but I realized, at least in material terms, that the holidays weren’t equivalent.

In 2018 Americans spent an average of $1,007 per person on food, gifts, and decorations during the Winter Holidays, notes The National Retail Federation. This year they predict that number to increase between 3.8 and 4.2 percent, with holiday sales totaling upwards of $728 billion.

Hanukkah banners, garlands, cardboard cutouts, sequin-sprinkled ornaments—even inflatables for the front lawn—have joined the party. “If you’ve been lusting over the luscious greenery in your neighbor’s Christmas decorations, consider a natural take on a Star of David for your Hanukkah display,” states an article on decor ideas in Southern Living magazine. “Our stock of oversize decorations puts the reason for the season on full display,” promises Zion Judaica, an online superstore with a mission to “make these eight special nights bigger and brighter than ever before.”

I wonder if these efforts to emulate America’s biggest consumer holiday succeed in affirming Jewish identity. Or does the attempt to rival Christmas with its commodification actually diminish Hanukkah’s significance and blur the distinction between Jews and gentiles?

Years ago I worked at a school where a first-grade teacher directed her students to write “Dear Santa” letters in class. The compulsory activity put a Jewish boy in tears. I tried to address the inappropriateness of the assignment—how it ostracized the few non-Christian students. Why enhance their sense of difference during a time of year that magnified their minority status?

“Well, Santa isn’t really Christmas,” the teacher replied, in defense of secular joy.

She didn’t understand that Old Saint Nick wasn’t in the boy’s holiday lexicon. The remedy: he could write to a relative instead! But Jewish families don’t consider whether children on their gift list are naughty or nice: there was no substitute for the man in a red suit.

That year my students gave me enough presents to fill a sleigh: CDs, soaps, coffee, cookies, lotions, chocolate, a jewelry box, gift certificates, a writing journal and bottles of wine. Plus, a sparkly ornament for my nonexistent tree.

“You don’t want to wait until Christmas to open them all?” a colleague asked.

“It’s hard being a Jew at Christmas,” one third grader explained to her classmates after sharing a picture book about a girl who asks her parents for a Hanukkah bush. Although they refuse to grant her wish, they do help her to reconcile her conflicted feelings.

I could relate. My mother, who agreed to my father’s stipulation that his children be raised Jewish, converted from Christianity after my brother was born. (“I look forward to becoming a Yiddishe Mama,” she wrote to my grandparents.) When I turned 11, my parents divorced. For the next few years, she subjected us to a clandestine Christmas. Our frenzied exchanges felt as hollow as the giant stockings she quilted, which we were now obligated to fill.

My stepsister, who lived in an interfaith household that blended both customs, married a man who also converted. Together, they’ve raised two Jewish children in San Francisco. Each year they string dreidel-shaped lights across a mantel bedecked with blue-and-silver wrapped presents and multiple menorahs aglow. She considers these items, however, to be conciliatory. Putting less emphasis on material objects and more focus on “togetherness,” she says it’s the family time that matters.

I, too, am eager to reclaim the sanctity of those earlier traditions—without all the trappings. My brother, on the other hand, switched to Christmas just six years after his Bar Mitzvah. At least his three boys don’t have to hide their tree from their dad. I just hope they know what Hanukkah candles look like.

This year’s Hanukkah begins at nightfall on Dec. 22.

The largest, most-respected organic outdoor cannabis competition in the world returns to the North Bay this month when the 16th annual Emerald Cup returns to the Sonoma County Fairgrounds on Dec. 14 and 15.

Encompassing over 500 contest entries from sungrown flower cultivators and currently licensed California cannabis businesses, the Emerald Cup is the premiere place to support local, small-business growers and vendors still struggling to make their way in California’s newly legalized cannabis industry.

“I wish I could say it’s been an easier year (than 2018), but it’s actually in most ways been even harder for most people,” says Emerald Cup founder and producer Tim Blake. “Continued over-taxation, restrictions, lots of regulations—it’s a perfect storm. You’ve got not enough dispensaries opened up, so you don’t have enough places to sell product to, you don’t have enough product makers because they haven’t got their license from the state.”

While Blake foresees the market doing well in the next few years, he cites the state’s inability to be proactive in helping cannabis businesses thrive as a major problem for small-time merchants.

“The Cup’s going to do well this year, but we’re still watching people go through a lot of challenges,” he says.

As the Cup’s grown in size and status over the years, it’s been a boon to small farmers and makers who enter the respected contest, as well as a magnet for larger brands to make a splash on the scene.

“One cool thing that we’ve been able to maintain in the contest is the personal-use category,” says Associate Producer Taylor Blake. “The Cup started as a competition among friends—there were no brands—and it was important that a grower who wanted to have their six plants in their backyard could participate in the Emerald Cup. Last year was our first year with the personal-use category and we just did it with flowers. This year we are extending that to Solventless Concentrates, which we are excited about and had a lot of interest in last year.”

In addition to the cannabis competition, this year’s Cup boasts musical acts from headliners like dancehall-inspired indie-pop star Santigold and reggae legends Steel Pulse (see music, pg 22), as well as informative sessions on everything from federal cannabis legalization efforts to regenerative agriculture to psychedelics and plant medicine.

This year also features special guest Tommy Chong, who will receive the Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award.

“We’re excited to have Tommy come and join us,” says Tim Blake. “He’s been an amazing advocate for our industry and our community.”

Other Emerald Cup highlights include live art, expos, organic food and a marketplace packed with vendors.

“Between all the speakers, music, VIPs and community; we’ve gone to great lengths to make it a unique experience,” Blake says. “Knowing that the whole tribe comes in to hang for the weekend is what it’s all about.”