Spirit of Unity : Kwanzaa celebrates a commitment to community. It’s a message that’s speaking to a growing number of African Americans.

How are traditions born? Woven delicately into the texture of one’s life? Tailored into comfortable family ritual?

They begin with the careful and deliberate process of connection--piece to piece, panel to panel--so that the stitches don’t show.

That has been, for at least the last 15 years, Eric V. Copage’s endeavor--personally and professionally--linking the paths of past and future and underscoring their relevance to the present.

Over the last few years, Copage has been filing dispatches from the field of discovery. Among them “Kwanzaa: An African American Celebration of Culture and Cooking” and “Black Pearls,” a collection of meditations, each neatly packaged personal interpretations of the Kwanzaa holiday.

His latest is a new, slim childhood-keepsake volume, “A Kwanzaa Fable” (Morrow), and a complementing CD, “Kwanzaa Music: A Celebration of Black Cultures in Song” (Rounder Records)--two additions to further augment a new tradition.

In simply telling a tale, he lays out suggestions to guide those searching for their own tangible Kwanzaa model. Conceived just three decades ago, this December holiday and its rituals remain uncharted land, a cultural celebration to embrace, to make one’s own.

To Copage, fully appreciating Kwanzaa comes from merging the annual celebration with everyday’s tradition of keeping house, hearth and heart at the forefront of one’s existence.

Celebrated for seven days, from Dec. 26 to Jan. 1, Kwanzaa borrows many elements from African harvest festivals and takes its name from a Swahili word for “first fruits of the harvest.” It is a nonreligious holiday conceived in the late 1960s by Maulana Karenga, director of the African American Cultural Center and Black Studies chair at Cal State Long Beach.

Seven principles, Nguzo Saba, set the basic framework by which one should strive to live his or her life: umoja (unity), kujichagulia (self-determination), ujima (collective work and responsibility), ujamma (cooperative economics), nia (purpose), kuumba (creativity), imani (faith). During Kwanzaa those principles are reexamined and restless spirits are rededicated to that purpose.

From Germany, Canada and Turkey to India, the Caribbean and even Africa, that base steadily widens, spurred on by waves of interest in connecting with African culture. Subira Kifano, assistant director of Karenga’s African American Cultural Center, estimates that 18 million people of African origin around the world celebrate some version of Kwanzaa, and Karenga travels the globe uniting this extended community.

Rashena Lindsay, spokeswoman for Hallmark Inc., estimates that about 10 million people in the United States celebrate the holiday, twice as many as in 1992, when Hallmark brought out its first cards embossed with Kwanzaa icons, including the kinara (seven-branched candlestick), the kikome cha umoja (unity cup), muhini or vivunzi (ears of corn to symbolize each child in the family).

With 12 designs this year, Lindsay says, “We’ve tried to keep up with the trend and the number of African Americans who celebrate the holiday, while still paying close attention to the meaning of the holiday and its place in African American culture and heritage.”

Copage and his family are among those steadily growing statistics--African Americans seeking a ritual tied to tradition, something specific to their culture. But the segue wasn’t seamless.

As Copage read voraciously and queried others about the holiday, he found that celebrating it didn’t mean attempting to bat away Christmas. It was instead a intellectual sleight of hand that meant finding a place to merge--a holiday based on culture and one based on religion.

“I think all of this stuff has been living with me since I was 4 or 5 years old. I would see these things happening to black people. In the late ‘60s there was a lot of turbulence,” says Copage, a Los Angeles native. “And I thought wouldn’t it be good for black people to affirm ourselves. . . . I saw my grandmother looking at the Bible and she would gain a certain peace from it.

“When I learned about Kwanzaa I thought that it was a good holiday for my kids,” says Copage, who was looking for something that had resonance in a social climate that, for black men, often appeared indifferent at best, more often intolerant. He sifted through diverging interpretations of Karenga’s vision.

“I was told that you could only celebrate in one way,” Copage says. “Before my son was born, I thought what a pity that you have to substitute it for Christmas, what a pity that there was an ironclad rule. I walked around with that misinformation for years.

“Now I know people who Kwanzaa-fy their Christmas. Some who celebrate it every night, some who don’t at all.” Early on, Copage concluded that, “There’s no way I’m going to top Christmas. And I don’t even want to try.”

More important was finding a special yet practical place for Kwanzaa to reside in his family’s lives--not just as a mantelpiece adornment but as an affirmation of African and African American heritage.

Kifano stresses the importance of not being too broad in one’s interpretation, of respecting the seven principles and how and why they are linked. In this multicultural society, this annual observance can be waved as a flag, linking one to culture, to a larger cultural community--to one’s essence.

It is why Kifano and Karenga take issue with Copage stressing “individualism” and “pride” in his interpretations of the holiday’s framework.

“The most important part of the values stressed are collective and community values. Stressing individualism doesn’t represent Kwanzaa,” Kifano says. “We stress self-respect and respect for others and the deep understanding of cultural values. Pride is a very simplistic term that has come to mean very little and is not really rooted in the understanding of Kwanzaa.”

But Copage, in developing a confident posture of strength--especially for the younger generation--sees pride and individualism as a byproduct of self-determination.

“I have never, ever claimed to speak for Dr. Karenga,” he explains. “It is how I have embraced and adapted Kwanzaa into my life. My point is the only way you can have a strong community is through every individual developing themselves to the best of their capacities. You can’t have a strong black community if you have people flunking out of school, who on an individual level don’t do well. You can’t have a strong community if you don’t have people who are responsible to their families.”

And that journey toward self, inner strength, is at the center of “A Kwanzaa Fable.” Thirteen-year-old Jordan Garrison, grieving his father’s death, finds himself at a critical pause--straddling childhood and adulthood, while at the same time shrugging in and out of ill-fitting jackets of identity.

“There comes a time in black people’s lives when they have to decide what they mean when they say they are black. When they say that they are of African heritage. . . . You, Jordan, are now at that crossroads,” preaches Snackman, the neighborhood convenience store owner who dispenses after-school junk food alongside substantive food for thought. But his attempts to lend a guiding hand are summarily rebuffed--challenged by kids rippling with their first rush of street savvy, challenged by the young Jordan just learning his way in the world.

“Jordan bristled with anger. It sounded to him that Snackman was challenging his racial pride.” Copage’s protagonist turns the notion over and over. “After all . . . he knew most of the famous black American leaders of the past. . . . He could quote Malcolm X and was no stranger to prejudice. He had several T-shirts with pictures of the Motherland on it, and he wore those T-shirts proudly. . . . ‘Nobody tells me how to be black,’ Jordan fumed with a vehemence that surprised even himself.”

It is the message that lies within this puffed-up, hair-trigger declaration that Copage wants readers to examine. This thorny issue of identity serves as the how to: Applying the principles of Kwanzaa to the challenges of daily life.

The path to understanding what it is to be black--beyond slogans, beyond media interpretation, beyond peer pressure--is a journey that starts from the inside. Deeper self-knowledge unfolds in solitude; through quiet self-examination, one begins to understand the notion of purpose, the mist clears on the turns in life’s path.

This message is one that is often lost on a frequency cluttered with noisy signals boasting the contrary. And what makes Copage’s book particularly potent is that it is threaded through with morals and sobering life lessons without heavy-handed moralizing.

“I look at it as part of something larger,” Copage says. “I live in a town that is 50% black. Our kids, our young men in general, they spring a leak. It’s very weird. My theory was that they are kind of confronted with the fact they are black and the question is: What does that mean? They sort of internalize this society’s stereotypes about being black--as being sexually irresponsible, as being a criminal, as not being good in school--basically, to be a loser.”

So what makes a black man?

Copage, who is one, who is trying to raise one (and a daughter), even still finds himself asking; the definition constantly reworked, refined. His own formula is drawn from Nguzo Saba, the framework of Kwanzaa, tailored to his family desires and needs. It then becomes a equation of common sense.

“You adhere to the highest principles of culture. Being black then means getting good grades is a black thing to do. To be careful and abstain from sex is a black thing to do. To do well in your job is a black thing to do. To remain alert and alive and involved is a black thing to do.”

Every black person, Copage knows, comes to a crossroads, to the very place were Jordan stands, to the place where it is mandatory to determine the next, assured step. And once one crosses over, “To me it is being at this place to really savor life. The best of life.”

Although they are small gestures, he concedes, “my little Kente stoles, the pictures of my father and all of that--they all remind me of something larger--to live up to our ideals.”