Kwanzaa Vibes : The Duality of the African-American Holiday <i> and </i> Christmas Catches On With Those Who Yearn for a Non-Commercial, Spiritual and Ethnocentric Celebration.
I’ve been celebrating Kwanzaa since the early ‘80s, when I lived in the Bay Area--Oakland, Berkeley, San Francisco and East Palo Alto, which was later named Little Nairobi because of the African consciousness there.
Each region celebrated it so differently. In the Bay Area, each community was linked by their celebrations. It made it really nice that each night you had the opportunity to go to a different area to observe one of the nguzo saba principles. It made it a real connected community vibration.
There are several things I like about Kwanzaa, things that made me start celebrating it.
The first thing is the alternative to a commercial Christmas, what I knew Christmas to be when I was growing up. To me, Christmas really began to deviate from that vibe of friends and family--of that vibe of being thankful for just a stocking full of nuts. It escalated into, “Well, I want a leather coat,” and “I want a record player,” and then people started getting mad because they didn’t have enough money to buy things.
There’s supposed to be a spiritual connotation to Christmas of family, of nomads traveling from all over the world to come home.
But you run into people with attitudes, mad from shopping all day, elbowing each other in parking lots, running their credit cards up, getting into debt.
So when I first heard about Kwanzaa and the values it was trying to put on life, particularly African American life, it was an automatic appeal to me. It appealed to me from a political standpoint, as an African American and also from a commemorative community ritual standpoint. People need rituals and celebrations.
Through the years, I have seen Kwanzaa grow tremendously. People are not only tired of the commercialism, but younger people like my son Gregory, who’s 22, are coming up with a different consciousness about who they are. They’re becoming more Afrocentric in their base; they also want an alternative.
Kwanzaa isn’t something you just jump in and out of, like Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. It’s a seven-day period. And more people are understanding that they’re not giving up anything, that they’re not being indoctrinated into a cult by celebrating Kwanzaa.
People think they have to take an African name, they have to stop being a good Christian. Not at all--Kwanzaa has nothing to do with Christianity, except that it has the Christian consciousness of reaching out and extending yourself to others.
With Kwanzaa gift giving, you try to give people things that have some meaning to you, that have some personal meaning to them. And you get them something of African origin, something that relates to their history, their ancestry, and also some type of crafted thing if you’re gifted.
I’ve crocheted things, I’ve sewn things, I’ve done appliques. It personalizes something from me to them, and it symbolizes one of the principles of Kwanzaa-- kuumba, which is creativity. You give gifts that are meaningful, that can nurture people and are memoirs, rather than five sweaters or more makeup bags than you could ever use. Usually, you think back on Christmas gifts, you say, “What did I get last year?” and you can’t even remember.
As a child of divorce, my son has embraced both worlds of Christmas and Kwanzaa since he was very young. He could groove with Christmas every year with his father, and come right into the Kwanzaa thing with me.
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We light our candles, we go to the Kwanzaa celebrations, he puts on his African clothes. It’s natural to him. I’ve never dictated to him, “Christmas is over for you, you’ve got to do this now because you’re a black child.”
Kwanzaa is a thing that, because it raises your consciousness and sense of self-worth, is really a personal choice. And because you don’t embrace it doesn’t mean you’re any less celebratory, or care any less about having a time of commemoration.
As more knowledge is brought to Christian organizations about what Kwanzaa really is, Christmas and Kwanzaa are being celebrated more in duality.
On the other hand, let’s not negate the fact that there are many African Americans who want no association with their lineage or with Africa. They say, “I was born in America, my name is Beverly Jones” or whatever. I think that particular attitude is truly unfortunate. Too many African Americans want to begin their history with slavery because they don’t know who they were and where they came from.
Celebrating your ancestors during Kwanzaa gives you the most tremendous amount of strength and spirit. You realize that with all the slaves endured, they must have been a great people before they even got here. And we’re still around to put Kwanzaa together.