Just in time for the last week of December, Beth Kissileff has a query about the Yiddish word khoge, which denotes a non-Jewish holiday. Does it, she asks, refer only to a religious holiday like Christmas, or does it also include “civic holidays” like Thanksgiving and New Year’s?
Since civic holidays did not exist in Yiddish-speaking Eastern Europe before modern times, all holidays being either Christian or Jewish, a khoge (pronounced “KHAW-geh,” with the “kh” like the “ch” in the spelling Chanukah) was by definition Christian.
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