#hand puppet

Canada Goose Puppet

My visceral "what is THAT?" reaction is the same way a lot of people online seem to respond to their first sighting of these hand puppets. It's the rubber heads. They seem so uncanny.

These are part of an earnestly well-intentioned educational movement, though, probably in the late 1980s or 1990s: having serious multicultural representation for kids. This was not something that could be taken for granted before then! You can find non-white dolls before 1990, if you know where to look, but it wasn't yet a norm that of course a range of races/ethnicities should be represented.

Rummaging through eBay and etsy, I'm pretty sure of the existence of:

Latino family (this set)

Muslim family (wife/mother wears a head wrap)

Black family (quite dark-skinned, for once)

Asian family (harder to find)

White family (blonde mother and daughter, red-brown hair on dad and son)

Each family set contains mother, father, son, daughter, and baby (not seen in my pic). From the vantage of 2026, we can point out that these choices ignore mixed-race families (buy two sets, mix-and-match), assume heteronormativity (buy two sets, mix-and-match), and don't address disabilities (true). But in the 1990s, toys like this were a big step forward from making whiteness the default.