When is a Holiday Not a UU Holiday?

I’m not really big on holidays. I just procrastinate too much. I can barely get my friends’ birthday cards out on time. A few years ago I decided to start celebrating Kwanzaa because I no longer felt qualified to celebrate the two Islamic holidays. Adopting Christmas was still a strange notion. So I thought, “Well, I can do Kwanzaa; my religion may change, but I’ll always be black.” However, my laziness prevailed and I only managed to read up on it and send out Kwanzaa cards eleven months later.

This year I’ve been preoccupied, and haven’t been home for days at a time, so Kwanzaa is on hold again. In fact, I’ll be spending Christmas Eve with friends, and the Big Day with my Catholic grandmother and the DH’s non-religious family. I’m just going where the people I like are.

Jess writes on her blog that she’s pleased her home congregation is no longer doing a Kwanzaa service. Although it may be for different reasons, I agree with her that it doesn’t make sense for most UU churches to put on Kwanzaa services.

From what I know, most of the Kwanzaa celebration takes place within the home. And since the purpose is essentially for African descended folks to remember their roots and remain in community with each other, it just seems weird that white people would be the ones to “put it on” for their mostly white congregations.

I’d feel the same way about UU congregations putting on a Chinese New Year service. It’s really a lot more than just a dancing dragon and a couple of firecrackers. It’s one thing to recognize or acknowledge that these are holidays some folks in the congregation might be celebrating, but picking a day to “celebrate” either Kwanzaa or Chinese New Year via sermon + black candles or sermon + a CD somebody picked up in Chinatown is just really awful.

If I went to my church and found they were holding an Eid al-Fitr Sunday I’d be alarmed and really want to know what was going on. And I’m not even Muslim anymore! It’s not that I don’t think non Muslims can’t learn anything from the Islamic holidays, but seeing as how Islam is hardly mentioned the other 51 weeks of the year, what exactly is being celebrated?

Comments

9 Responses to “When is a Holiday Not a UU Holiday?”

juffie on December 17th, 2006 8:18 am

Posted a comment on Jess’s site too about this. As a pink Caucasian UU, alas what is going on when many UU congregations celebrate Kwanzaa seems to be all about “Look how good/inclusive/caring we are.”

Now, if in a truly mixed congregation, people whose celebration Kwanzaa rightly is were to come and say, we’d like to do a service, that would be something else. It would be folks being able to use their church as they needed to … right on.

If you invite me to help you celebrate your culture, I’m delighted, fascinated, honored. It’s something quite different for pink li’l ol me to “celebrate” Kwanzaa. As in, it don’t make sense.
Jess on December 17th, 2006 2:56 pm

Yes, yes, and more yes, to both of you.
Jamie Goodwin on December 17th, 2006 9:20 pm

My congregation this year did an Eid al-Fitr service, and I have the same trepidations.

At the same time, taking the time to learn about other faiths… and yes even celebrate them certainly feels right.

In my mind, Kwanzaa is not a religious holiday and as you said is primarily celebrated in the home. It would feel odd in a church setting. I would be for it though - even if a congregation was 100 percent white if it was done in a respectful, caring, teaching way. Respectful to me would include all of the items you and others have brought up by the way.

To not do something only because of “the way it will look” is just as bad in my mind as doing something only because of “the way it will look”.
jess on December 17th, 2006 10:53 pm

I would argue, Jamie, that since the founder of Kwanzaa himself defines it as an African-American holiday meant to celebrate one’s “Africanness” that it makes no sense whatsoever for an all-white congregation to celebrate it.

Kwanzaa in particular has been marketed now in with Christmas and Hannukah (Happy ChrismaHannuKwanzaakah, said some commercial incessantly last year or the year before, why couldn’t it be ChrismaHannuSolstikah?) in such a way that I think many people feel obligated to pay lip service to it in a rather clumsy attempt to feel inclusive. It’s not the “Black Christmas,” for god’s sake. It drives me crazy.

That and I’ve never actually met any African-Americans who celebrate Kwanzaa, though I know lots of white people in my home church who think it’s the best thing ever.
LaReinaCobre on December 18th, 2006 1:22 am

Maybe the difference is over the word “celebrate,” which can be used to mean anything from the joyous end of a month-long religious observance to acknowledging the existence of a religious practice.
Clyde Grubbs on December 19th, 2006 6:36 am

Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley developed a Kwanza service that allowed a small group of African Americans to celebrate Kwanza with non African Americans (including so called white people.) The parts of the service for non African peoples was worded so that it was clear that they were entering into an emphathic participation in African American experience and owning the contribution of African descending peoples to this country. It was not a lets play African-American ritual.

I think it may be impossible for an “all white” congregation to celebrate Kwanza, but our goal is to build multicultural congregations, and for me this means careful and appropriate entering into the cultural expressions of all of the people of the congregation.
Barbara Preuninger on December 19th, 2006 9:19 am

Our congregation does a Kwanzaa service every year, and I’ve always felt vaguely uncomfortable with it, for the reasons outlined here - i.e. it’s all about our 99% white congregation appearing to be multi-cultural (style over substance). I’ve brought it up with a few people, but have never really made a big stink about it, because there’s a high chance I will be misunderstood/misinterpreted and I can’t stand that.

That said, I’ve gone to the service a few times, and (ironically) I really enjoyed it (they had really cool drumming). Part of me realizes that the “guilty white liberal” thing is a hard part of UU to change, and confronting people in a very forceful way just causes them to close up to you. As a white person, I can be easily dismissed (on this issue at least) as somehow “less aware”, etc.

In fact, I was thinking of sending a link to Jess’s post to various members of our congregation, and then I thought… nah. Given that the service is already planned for Dec. 31, I feel like I’d just be pissing people off if I did that.
LaReinaCobre on December 19th, 2006 10:10 am

I would like to see more drumming at my church services - just not simply because it’s a “designated” time (e.g. Black History Month, acknowledgment of internment of Japanese-Americans, etc.).
The Emerson Avenger on December 23rd, 2006 2:05 am

“What exactly is being celebrated?”

Smug, self-satisfied, self-congratulatory, aren’t we oh so “liberal” posturing for the most part. . .