Horrifying. She puts acorns on it. Is that some sort of quasi-rustic tribute to the hard-scrabble roots of the African American experience? I have never eaten (or even been offered) an acorn by any black cook.

It upsets me that innocent people might identify that wreck with some aspect of African American culture.

The closeup of her stabbing the cake to make room for candles was unsettling.

Hey! That's how we thought about Jews that made a big deal about Hanukkah in my house!

Second, from the perspective of this white male, it seemed like such a "look-at-me" concoction. Christmas as we know it, for instance, has been around long enough to grown organically into what we have now (for better or worse). Admittedly, Kwanzaa hasn't been around long enough for that, but from my perspective it seems like they tried to invent a holiday as a complete holiday, with all of the new "traditions" already provided. A lot of what we know of as Christmas, like the tree for instance, was cobbled together over the centuries.

Along with the me-too aspect, I've always wondered about the sincerity of the holiday itself. Again, admittedly, I've not studied it in depth, but I do remember years ago reading up on it and how it reflected the x number of African y ideals. My first question has always been...which African ideals? Sub-Saharan? Mediterranean? Everywhere in between? Africa is now and has always been an extremely diverse continent. To make descriptive statements like they did, and may since have cleaned up to be more coherent, seemed just to add more arbitrary inventive flair.

I'm all ears if I'm wrong on my recollections.

Hey! That's exactly how we thought about Jews that made a big deal about Hanukkah!

But isn't the criticism not so much that Kwanzaa has no real religious or cultural basis (although it is this as well, you just can't put 30 years against 2,000) and more that it is somehow anti-culture and separatist? Isn't the holiday meant for black people exclusively and intended to promote what are widely accepted as socialist principles (again, not my criticism since I don't know what these principles are and haven't the time to research)?

I think the principles and purpose behind Kwanzaa and not so much its lack of foundation are what draw the ire of critics. If some black folk decided they would celebrate Festivus or the Sol Invictus, I don't think there would be such a big deal over it.

Mine and Peggy’s is a mixed marriage, born from mixed marriages. Within our children mingles the blood of their Ashkenazi, Irish, German, and English ancestors. Some arrived on the shores of this country within living memory, others have been here since well before the Declaration of Independence.

Though we are an areligious household, our children’s faith heritage is diverse. For us there is no sectarian drama surrounding the Winter holidays, only more ways to celebrate the season.

Christmas morning, we will make the three hour drive to my wife’s parents’ house for the annual gathering of the clan. This affair takes place in a rambling Victorian house on a tree-lined street; a veritable Norman Rockwell Christmas rendering, made modern by the presence of of Jews and Muslims and Buddhists, all gathered to enjoy the warm tidings of the season.

To that I'll add, if a Quanzaist(?) ends up marrying into the family, so much the better. There'll be bean pie next to the fruitcake, and drank next to egg nog. I'll even have an excuse to wear my West African shirt, which usually gets put away for the Winter.

I have read a couple articles lately not really attacking it, but noting that it doesn't seem to be getting near as much publicity as it did five years ago.

Did your family celebrate any holidays when you were a kid?

Just curious!

Sincerely,
peep

They're not free. You have to be, as Stewie Griffen once said, "good". Obviously another facet of patriarchal control inherent in our culture. Think about this for a bit of mental gymnastics, though. People came up with the St Claus myth in a time when you could beat the crap out of your kids and it wasn't considered abhorrent. Why the extra layer? (just musing)

Agreed with the exclusionary taint angle, but the arbitrary fully-packaged holiday vibe always threw me more.

My 12 year old son has never NOT celebrated Kwanzaa. Trying telling him that his family tradition is just a knock-off of someone else's.

I appreciate Ta-Nehisi's defense of Kwanzaa from the bs, but not so much the piling on of new bs.

If anyone is interested in a sincere discussion of Kwanzaa, I'm blogging every day of the holiday at my website: http://www.windonwater.net/index.php?blog=15.0. Also, the Organization US is a great resource (no matter what you think of Dr. Karenga).

QT

This is a very important point. It doesn't take long to create traditions that feel "real" and "genuine" to the participants. If you've been doing something since you were a kid it probably feels like a real tradition to you.

Classic. I'll admit Kwanzaa always seemed like it was trying too hard. All holiday's are "made up" so it gets a pass there, but it seemed replete with all of these traditions that really weren't traditional.

k1
ryanculver.blogspot.com

Granted, most definitely. But how many seem like they were created in reaction to other holidays?

She didn't put acorns on her Kwanzaa cake, she put corn nuts on it. But she *called* them acorns because she's an idiot. In that same episode she made a horrible Hanukkah cake and a horrible Christmas cake so she really is an equal opportunity offender. Anyway, in the last week or so, the Kwanzaa cake recipe disappeared off of the Food Network website, so I imagine that they received some complaints.

That said - Martin Luther nailed 95 theses to a wall, with no intention whatsoever of founding a new church. A new church was just about forced upon him by time, circumstance, and the people.

Similarly - Kwanzaa, by virtue of its lifespan, has outgrown its original mission statement - the traditions themselves are what matter, much more than the "say no to commercialization" stuff. And, for the record - the commercialization of Christmas AND the commercialization of Kwanzaa both serve as ongoing attractants to the holiday. An attractant - not the entire raison d'etre.

QT

That's okay, I'm just glad I'm not the only one. Her "tablescapes" (hate that word) horrify me.

I appreciate the response and the sentiments, but I don't believe I said anything contrary to what you're saying.

I would point out, though, that numerically speaking, there are far more poor folk that weren't black that couldn't afford an over-commercialized Christmas when Kwanzaa burst on to the scene. Wouldn't you say they were not only marginalized by mainstream American Christmas celebration traditions and then again when the new "poor folk" holiday excluded them by virtue of ethnicity?

She's like watching the foodie equivalent of a slasher film. You know something horrible is going to happen, but you don't know when or how it's going to play out. The camp value of her show is through the roof. If I didn't know better, I'd think she was actually created by John Waters.

Using Andrew's holiday term, she inspires an amazing amount of hathos by food lovers. We watch her for the purpose of mocking her horrible, horrible cooking. We can't turn away.

Well, this is true, but I have a feeling that if I told people (black or white) that I was celebrating Kwanzaa, they would look at me funny... It would probably take a while to convince them I wasn't joking...

A: For when you're not around.

Actually, most if not all of the entire Christian calendar is based on Celtic and other pagan religious festivals (Halloween/All Souls = Samhain). So for me, the 25th of December is just a continuation of thousands of years of tree-worshipping that my Druid ancestors started.

the african american culinary tradition, u r doing it wrong.

bean pie = maybe regional/religious(?), sweet potato pie is what you'd more likely find on my family's holiday table

drank = informal, sweet tea is more like it
(this is also closely correlated with Southern culinary traditions).

you and Sandra Lee can quit making up stuff.

It's (they're) all good?

The attacks on Kwanzaa just never made any sense to me. Nobody is pulling folks off the street to force them to celebrate Kwanzaa, and the Black folks who attack it just always come off sounding ' Samboish'.

Right or wrong; Christmas, Chanukah, or Quanza; whatever creed or color; would it matter, so long as we were all enjoying being together, warm and well-fed, on a cold dark Winter night? (Please pass the pie.)

I've personally suffered at the hands of one of these fake, fake cultural folks...

Its' just another hypocrite sport...a bunch of people, fake people, pretending to love one another and work together, when most of them are "running up each others' back"

Everyone running around buying African clothes that they barely wear at any other time...with sheets of paper that they read from, bad poetry, and "healthy food" that could give a dog, food-poison...

This would be a great opportunity to "tell the truth", but no-one breaks rank to really help the community with the truth.
Another disappointing micro-cosm of Life in its' most culturally Fake aspect....

Slightly O/T- I was reading about the NY Senate candidates today and found that Sandra Lee is supposedly dating NY Atty Genl Andrew Cuomo.

Yes - I'd agree that lots of poor people could have used another kind of tradition, but a holiday born in the 60s is certainly going to reflect what was going on... and the commercialization of Christmas was only one of the stated reasons for Kwanzaa. I only addressed it in fairness to your comment - it would be unfair to go on a long spiel about all else that Kwanzaa is about, when a. you didn't ask, and b. it's absolutely true that ONE of the reasons for the holiday was to combat the perceived ill of predatory commercialization.

And the point also stands when you take into account poor Chinese kids who aren't going to take too well to the fat white santa, but remember that some of the protest against the commercialized version of Kwanzaa was the undue love for a fictional white guy, instead of a genuine appreciation for very real black arents. That experience - the perpetuation of rejection of black in favor of white - is also a part of what Kwanzaa aims to correct. And so on.

My point is - Kwanzaa is not "just" a rejection of Christmas. It isn't EVEN a rejection of Christmas - African American Christians who celebrate the birth of Jesus celebrate Kwanzaa the very next day. It is a lot more than that, and dissing the holiday just because it was born 40 years ago by a man still alive today is unfortunate, and ultimately, unfair.

QT

I suppose it might also be true that anyone can celebrate Hannukah. After all, what's not to celebrate? God provided a miracle to an oppressed people - light sustained for 8 days that should have extinguished in one. But taking the holiday out of the context of the wider history of the Jewish people, and their struggle to maintain their culture would be wrong.

QT

Sometimes a latke is just a latke.

Yeah right now. But I wonder how long it will be true. As I said, holidays aren't static. Kwanzaa was originally supposed to be about hand-made gifts. But I know plenty of kids who got remote control cars for Kwanzaa. I'm not dissing--more to the point, I think it's like most other American holidays.

@Believe it and Rosali:

I hear you. It felt forced for me as well - especially when doing it with a whole bunch of people. Over the years, we've come to do Kwanzaa rather privately - I'm longing to have a karamu feast, but typically don't bother. Whenever I do have one - there'll be very little talking about Kwanzaa - and I'm not asking anyone to dress up.

The moment when it stopped feeling like a contrivance to me was the morning my son woke up and asked me why we hadn't decorated for Kwanzaa yet. He was a bit worried that somehow or another, Kwanzaa wouldn't be happening. He gets lots of presents for Kwanzaa, though we always make sure a good balance of those presents are books and other meaningful gifts - but when we can afford presents, we do afford them... never mind what anyone else has to say about it. My family - my tradition. And that year - he was about 7, I realized that Kwanzaa was all he'd ever known, and I got into the heart of what it meant for him.

Its never felt forced since then.

QT

TNC: Yeah, ok, I have to cop to that. My son gets to make a list, and I do my best to get whatever's on it. I couldn't handmake a anything if my life depended on it - no time, and no talent.

But - I'm not unhappy about it being another "American" holiday either. I mean - I'm American. More specifically, I'm African-American, and that means a lot of things. I try to bring all of that to the table.

QT

Pedophiles and practitioners of incest and bestiality, not to mention rapists will no doubt agree with you, but a touch more nuance might be prudent.

Also new things are always mocked. And in terms of holidays Kwanzaa is relatively new. Take pretty much any religion founded in the last fifty years, even if it's highly white and upper-class, and you'll see it be called a cult. (I'm not counting most schisms of established religious denominations. Whatever schisms happen among the Episcopalians, or if schisms happen in the AME church, it's unlikely any of them will be deemed cults)

Although mockery might be unfair, some hesitancy is understandable. At times people will try to create some new religion or holiday and it doesn't go anywhere. Some people are just temperamentally "wait and see" people. If it's widespread thirty years from now Kwanzaa will probably be more-or-less accepted.

Very little of the core Christian calendar is Celtic. Christianity grew up in the Mediterranean world and the core pagan influences on it were Greek and Roman. The very calendar is the Roman calendar, with months named for Rome's gods and emperors. To be sure, in the Celtic lands some Celtic influences crept in, and the same is true in Germanic, Slavic, Ethiopian and other territories. In fact, the process is ongoing: Native American and African Christianity has rather recently absorbed elements from those cultures too. (Note: old Irish Samhain was in mid-October; it was not Oct 31. Some of its customs very obviously migrated to Halloween, but not the date itself).

Wow, that is spectacularly wrong. I mean really, badly, wrong, dude. I care about the Christmas wars about as much as I care about the Kwanzaa wars, but I know how terrible that is.

Dude, let's be grateful this nuanced thinking wasn't applied to defend various forms of bigoted radio satire. That would be a credibility buster.

Not to veer the discussion off course, but it still exists, alive and well, on YouTube, and food bloggers take this time every year to poke fun at it. Only she doesn't call it a "Kwanzaa cake" per se. She calls it a most amazing "angel food harvest cake" - complete with corn nuts to fill in for the "acorns".

If I may post the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=we2iWTJqo98

If I may not, just go to YouTube and search for "Kwanzaa cake" - it's the first video that pops up.

Emphasis added for JonF and others who cannot scan a sentence correctly. Take out the reference to the word "Celtic" and the sentence reads: "Most...of the calendar is based on pagan religous festivals." I could have also said "Greek and other pagan festivals." Or "Jewish and pagan traditions."

(Which I'm sure some commenter would have mistakenly scanned as "Jewish and other pagan traditions" and tossed off a reply informing me that Judaism is not pagan.).

Speaking of which...the "nuance" crap. When I read T-N's remark about sex acts, I did not need him to exposit and extrapolate and explain that, by the way, he really didn't mean abuse of children or sexual assault. Of course he didn't mean that. To expect him to write an entire legalese paragraph with exceptions and carve-outs isn't to demand "nuance" -- it's saying that nuance goes right over your head. It's admitting a complete inability to recognize subtext, or infer intent.

Apologies for the rant, but I'm rather incensed. (Or something more nuanced? Perhaps galled. Vexed. Annoyed. Safer still? Displeased.).

A: For when you're not around.

A#2: Also because a small child has difficulty understanding how an omniscient, but unpresent God can watch over his actions, which would require him to behave. But, create an omniscient AND anthropomorphic overseer, especially one who is a jolly, fat man in a slick fuzzy get-up who also controls the quality and quanitity of presents and the child will have a better ability to understand and grasp the need to behave...well, at least for the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

As for the issue of commercialization -- name a celebration that is not commercialized in America. That's what we do here, create demand so that people will buy shit they don't need, but still desperately want. The challenge with gifting is to create/design gifts that are less about money than beauty, effort, sentimentality, nostalgia, and various other kinds of lovely ephemera. Frankly, I think the no presents hardcore is a bit uncreative and even a little mean-spirited. I understand the anti-consumerist and even revolutionary ideology behind it but like most militancy it just rubs me the wrong way.

I suppose we can rail and whine about consumerism, but ultimately it's our own choice how commercially saturated holidays in our own houses become.

We wouldn't want to do that, now, would we? Judge a guy (elf) by the color of his skin and not the content of his character (bag of presents)?

Err...no?

The most important part of the Christian calendar - the Lent/Easter/Pentecost cycle - is pretty explicitly based on the Jewish calendar. In many European languages, the words for "Passover" and "Easter" are identical or nearly identical. (French: Pâques vs Pâque; Spanish: Pascua). Obviously some parts of the calendar, including Christmas, come out of pagan tradition, but the most important part of the Christian calendar is surely a pretty sizeable exception to the idea that the Christian calendar is mostly based on pagan observances.

Which is not to deny the pagan influence on Christian observance. But we should be clear that the Jewish influence is to a considerable degree more important.

There are fake and sincere practitioners of any tradition, religion, etc. Perhaps Karenga was the original fake practitioners, but since him many people have taken it up as their own. America is not enhanced by shooting down anyone's attempt to create non-materialistic culture.

Growing up with the traditions of Polish Christmas, whose lukewarm celebration in my house would take a paragraph to list, it seemed in my ignorance that the Polish-Americans had distinctive Christmas traditions, as did our neighbors of Greek, Serbian, German and Mexican extraction while African-Americans had nothing beyond the WASPy turkey, church and presents. From my (admittedly ignorant) position, it just seemed fair that African-Americans developed their own traditions.

Of course, the other ethnic traditions developed in a milieu of near-universal poverty, occasional famine, semi-serfdom, isolation and without the American mass-market machine. That made them authentic -- probably so authentic that our kin on the other side of the Atlantic are leaving them behind as quaint.

Can't we all just get along? This is a great time to be alive even if we are so removed from our harmony with the Universe we have forgotten, and want to forget, our heritage in the quest for who can die with the most toys. You don't find a miracle, you live one. When you get cancer or sick or have a dead loved one all you want is the miracle of normal returned.

That's what all these Jewish, and Christian, and African, and Native American, and Muslim holidays or holi-days, or holy-days are all about . Let's have a little compassion for all people in this competitive rat race world. Let's share food and share some love. We are too divisive. We all need to be meaner to machines and nicer to all people. Machines have no compassion, no love, but we humans have a unique gift of the ability to love and have compassion. Can't we all share and get along? Let's stop being racist human doings and start being compassionate human beings.

Peace, Jack Goldman, St. Paul, MN

And yes, the Hannukah cake was completely non-kosher. However, it didn't get apple pie filling and corn nuts, so there ya go.

TC, have you seen the madness that is Sandra Lee? I think this is well worth a full post from you.

I'm surprised Sandra hasn't been called on the carpet by Kwanzaa pundits, or Mr. Karenga himself.