Statement just in from the White House:
“Michelle and I extend our warm thoughts and best wishes to all those celebrating Kwanzaa this holiday season. Today marks the first day of the week-long celebration of African-American history and culture through the seven principles of Kwanzaa: unity, self determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, and faith.
To many, Kwanzaa serves as a time of reflection–taking lessons learned from our past and looking forward to a more promising tomorrow. It reminds us that though there is much to be thankful for we must recommit ourselves to building a country where all Americans have the opportunity to achieve their dreams.
As families across America light the Kinara today in the spirit of unity, our family extends our prayers and well wishes during this season.”
President George W. Bush also marked each year during his terms with Kwanzaa greetings.
The founder of Kwanzaa is now the chair of Cal State Long Beach’s Department of Africana Studies — this from the Long Beach Post:
Created in 1966 by Dr. Maulana Karenga as a way for African-Americans to honor their shared heritage and culture, the seven-day celebration—which begins today, December 26, and goes until January 1—has become an important holiday for those with black heritage worldwide.
Starting today with a parade down Crenshaw Blvd., the 36th annual Kwanzaa Gwaride Parade and Festival will be the largest Kwanzaa kickoff celebration in Southern California. With this year’s festival theme being “Freedom from Obesity,” the parade’s Iyaba (queen) and Oba (king) are both medical practitioners. The Kwanzaa Heritage Festival will also be held in Leimert Park on December 29 and will include live music, traditional dancing, a drum circle and international marketplace.
In his 2012 founders statement, Dr. Karenga discusses his theme for this year’s Kwanzaa, “Us and the Well-being of the World: A Courageous Questioning.”
“At the center of this concern and care must be a constant and courageous questioning first about how we understand and assert ourselves in the world and what this means,” Dr. Karenga wrote. “Thus, the Day of Meditation during Kwanzaa which is the culminating point and place of our remembrance, reflection and recommitment calls on us to sit down, think deeply about ourselves in the world, and measure ourselves in the mirror of the best of our culture to determine where we stand.”
Did I miss the Festivus message? I certainly did not get the chance to air my grievances.
“through the seven principles of Kwanzaa: unity, self determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz……”
Never get through the entire list without falling asleep.
The other ones are on the tip of my tongue…”duck, dive and dodge?” No, that’s not it. “Piety, fortitude and fear of the Lord?” Wait, that the other thing. Oh! I remember! “Lust, sloth, and envy!!” Darn it! That’s the Democratic Party Platform. Nope, I can’t help you; I always fall asleep too.
They truly sing for the ages. If only Abraham Lincoln had had this kind of style, he might have amounted to something….
Probably the same peope who want to replace literature in classrooms with EPA rulings
One of them has to be – kill whitey. Or is that Farakhan’s cult?
– honored in the breach than the observance.
The “African festival” no African celebrates;
The “harvest festival” at no harvest time;
The festival of Swahili-clad Marxist gibberish invented by a violent felon, which misappropriates the seven-branched Menorah from the Temple in Jerusalem during the period of the year associated with the nine-branched menorah of Chanukah, and fills it with candles colored red, black and green, the colors of the Palestinian flag. Lest we forget, it was the Marxist/Islamist/Afrocentrist wing of the Civil Rights Movement that immediately made common cause with the PLO when that genocidal organization was first founded in 1964.
No doubt there are people out there who now resent the “appropriation of ancient African symbols” by those thieving Jews.
You are loved out here, Buzz. Give us a jolly Kwanzaa carol next?
“Kwanzaa emerged not from Africa, but from the FBI’s COINTELPRO. It is a holiday celebrated exclusively by idiot white liberals. Black people celebrate Christmas. (Merry Christmas, fellow Christians!)”
Ann Coulter
To paraphrase the Honorable Reverend Wright, “I am sick and tired of negros ,that arn,t down with the struggle.” If Obama had a Holliday named after him it would look just like Kwanzaa. All made up out of whole cloth, and no basis in realty.
Hmmm….I celebrate Pagan Yule on December 21-25 – if I lived in a sunny-winter climate I’d measure the sunset points on the SW horizon every night to try and detect the slightest hint of northern movement.
But alas my rituals are reduced to decorating, attending the local Longest Night Service and then doing a little bit of gift exchange and family dinner on Christmas Day. I consider “Christmas” to be an integral part of the Yule festivals.
Rather than decorate in mid- to late November and take stuff down in early January, I decorate in mid-December and everything comes down February 2 or 3.
I do similar. Christmas stuff starts to go up just after Thanksgiving and stays up until mid-ish January. I figure, cover everything.
No black people celebrate Kwanzaa. None. Either here, in any other Western country or on the entire continent of Africa. The holiday is entirely a separatist’s attempt to create a holiday out of whole cloth to celebrate something other than Whitey’s Christmas.
This is where our country is today: Slowly but surely substituting Christmas for everything else including a racist professor’s made up day of celebration.
G-d Bless America.
Four more years of President Jock Itch. God help me.
The good news about Kwanzaa is that in general it should show Progressives attempts to redefine traditions and mystic chords of memory so as to promote what are mainly economic agendas, of a Marxist nature, just are not going to catch fire as a general rule. If it weren’t for the fact that the black community has a distinct heritage from the rest of the nation (and that observation should not be taken as a criticism), this effort would have long ago died. Kwanzaa is a gunboat, Christmas is a dreadnought. One will blow the other out of the water, every time.
And Kwanzaa, because of its base in the distinct and different heritage of the black community, is the Progressive redefinition with the best chance of suceeding, but it hasn’t and probably won’t. Festivus has more chance of being the normal than anything cooked up by someone with economic policy in mind, first and foremost.
Even the French went back to the old names for the calendar.
Covering all of the bases for the nitwits, and taking a cue from Seinfeld, I wish people a “Happy Merry Chrisma-Hana-Kwanza-Kan.”
It adequately shuts them up.