Posted By Dan Greenfield on Dec 11, 2023 | 8 comments

Dennis wasn’t such a menace, after all…

By JIM BEARD

It was a five-page story. I was seven years old.

In 1971, my dad gave me the latest issue of Dennis the Menace Bonus Magazine, #99 to be exact. The cover of my copy has a date stamp of Oct. 14. It was a “Christmas Special,” my first such holiday grab-bag with Dennis of many to come. I absorbed it like I did every comic I was given. I was a sponge back then. I sucked everything up, digested it, and processed it.

That five-page story was set between many others in the issue, and while it only mildly stuck out to me at the time, it has stayed with me all these years, more than 50, in fact. Why? It taught a little Catholic kid with only Christmas on his mind what Hanukkah was.

Titled simply Happy Holidays, the tale illustrates Dennis’ chance meeting with his substitute milkman’s son, David—who happens to be Jewish.

David welcomes Dennis into his home to meet his grandfather and together the elderly man with the longish hair, beard, and kippah and his grandson explain (in somewhat kid-friendly terms) what the Festival of Lights is and what it means to their religion, to the bewildered, assumedly Christian young blonde boy we all know as a “menace.”

Among the humor bits—Dennis asks David if his grandfather is a “hippie”—it’s actually what Dennis admits is “a pretty good story.” For my 7-year-old self, it had strange words and names like “Syrians,” “Judas Maccabaeus,” and of course “Hanukkah,” but just like our little hero by tale’s end, I was more envious of the Jewish kids getting eight days of presents than feeling much like I learned anything.

But I had. That little story, those five pages by writer and artist Unknown, got filed away in my brain but refused to stay in their drawer. They’ve popped out unbidden nearly every single Christmas of my life and I’ve reflected fondly on them each and every time. The other stories in that issue? Eh, maybe. I couldn’t be pressed to remember them all, and even if I did, not in the detail I can recall David and Dennis and the story of that first Hanukkah “many years before the first Christmas,” as David’s grampa explained.

The coolest thing of all is that I’m pretty sure that story is where and when I learned about the holiday.

Oh, I’m certain I knew what Jewish people were by then, having most likely seen them in books and television shows and movies, but I can’t remember any other time I was exposed to the Hanukkah story before that Dennis the Menace comic. It was the first time I probably heard the name, saw a hanukkiyah (aka menorah), and, most importantly, realized there was more to the season than Christmas.

Hopefully I can be forgiven for my ignorance: I was 7, and Christmas was everything for the good little Catholic goyim I was at Our Lady, Queen of the Most Holy Rosary Cathedral and grade school. And while we did have a very few kids in my class who weren’t Catholic, we didn’t have any who were Jewish. If I remember correctly, I didn’t meet an actual Jewish kid until I was a sophomore in high school. Too bad he and his grandfather didn’t sit me down and explain all the other Jewish holidays. I would have loved that.

They used to say you didn’t learn anything from comics, that they’d rot your brain. I have always maintained that I’ve learned more from comics than I did in school, and David and his grandfather’s beautiful little explanation of their holiday is proof of that.

Merry Christmas, everyone, and a very Happy Hanukkah.

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MORE

— SUPER-STAR HOLIDAY SPECIAL: How Aquaman Saved Hanukkah. Click here.

— TOP 13 Essential Jewish Comic Book Stories. Click here.

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When JIM BEARD’s not editing and publishing through his two houses, Flinch Books and Becky Books, he’s pounding out adventure fiction with both original and licensed characters. In fact, he’s put words in the mouths of Luke Skywalker, Superman, Fox Mulder, Carl Kolchak, Peter Venkman and the Green Hornet… and lived to tell about it. Check out one of his latest pop culture non-fiction books, Galloping Around the Cosmos: Memories of TV’s Wagon Train to the Stars From Today’s Grown-Up Kids. It’s available here.