Image by ooceey from Pixabay
Happy Kwanzaa!
If you’re not familiar with Kwanzaa, it’s a celebration of African American culture that begins the day after Christmas and ends on January 1. The celebration is based on harvest festival traditions from various parts of Africa, and the word Kwanzaa means first fruits. The holiday originated to restore and reaffirm African culture. It’s not a religious holiday but one celebrated by people of all faiths.
“Kwanzaa offers a new dialogue on Black culture, about our positive contributions to the world, and not just the negative stigma of race," says Dr. Adam Clark, an associate professor of theology at Xavier University.
Each day is dedicated to one of seven principles, and even though this is not a holiday that my family celebrates, these principles are important, and this tradition is beautiful. Each of the candles in the Kinara (seen in the image above), represents one of the principles.
Umoja (Unity): To strive for and to maintain unity in the family, community, nation, and race.
Kujichagulia (Self-Determination): To define and name ourselves, as well as to create and speak for ourselves.
Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility): To build and maintain our community together and make our brothers' and sisters' problems our problems and to solve them together.
Ujamaa (Cooperative economics): To build and maintain our own stores, shops, and other businesses and to profit from them together.
Nia (Purpose): To make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness.
Kuumba (Creativity): To do always as much as we can, in the way we can, in order to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it.
Imani (Faith): To believe with all our hearts in our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders, and the righteousness and victory of our struggle.
I wish all of you celebrating a very Happy Kwanzaa!
And for those of you learning about this important tradition for the first time, I encourage you to read more. I knew the basics but learned about the history and more in this Kwanzaa Wikipedia page and this great article from the Oprah Magazine.
Boxing Day
You see it on your calendar every year and maybe, like, me, you’ve wondered what it is. We don’t typically celebrate Boxing Day in the United States. It’s primarily a European holiday, but Canada and some other countries also participate. And no, it’s not a day to build boxes, or take boxes to the recycle bin, or to step in a ring and box someone. These days it’s mostly about shopping.
Per Wikipedia, “Boxing Day is a holiday celebrated the day after Christmas Day, thus being the second day of Christmastide [aka The 12 Days of Christmas]. Though it originated as a holiday to give gifts to the poor, today Boxing Day is primarily known as a shopping holiday.”
There is more than one theory about how it got started, and you can read all about it on the Wikipedia page.
The 12 Days of Christmas
If you’re wondering, as I was, what happened to celebrating the 12 Days of Christmas, and if there was more to it than an incredibly long song about birds and random people leaping and jumping and such, wonder no more!
Per my good friends at Wikipedia, “The traditions of the Twelve Days of Christmas have been nearly forgotten in the United States. Contributing factors include the popularity of the stories of Charles Dickens in nineteenth-century America, with their emphasis on generous giving; introduction of secular traditions in the 19th and 20th centuries, e. g., the American Santa Claus; and increase in the popularity of secular New Year's Eve parties.”
There’s a lot more information where that came from - check out the Wikipedia page.
I hope everyone found some joy on Christmas Day, despite things being as far from normal as they could possibly be. Personally, I found joy in FaceTiming with my parents, in watching the movie Soul on Disney+ - a beautiful film that is quite thought-provoking, and in an evening viewing of Hamilton (you can never go wrong with that decision). I had some good food, chatted with friends on the phone and via text, and thought a lot about what it might look like next year.
Until next time…Happy Kwanzaa! Happy Boxing Day! Happy Last Week of 2020!!