The War On Kwanzaa
(Sing to “Jingle Bells”)
Kwanzaa bells, dashikis sell
Whitey has to pay;
Burning, shooting, oh what fun
On this made-up holiday!
Not surprisingly, that little gem is from none other than Ann Coulter. (Found via ‘Midst The Hum.) In her re-hashed column from 2001, Coulter calls Kwanzaa “a synthetic holiday.” She goes on to describe it as “some phony non-Christian holiday invented a few decades ago by an FBI stooge.”
Normally, I would have given this particular screed about as much attention as I give anything else Ann Coulter writes or says, which is to say none. However, the notion that Kwanzaa should be dismissed (or, more precisely, derided) on the basis of its being a “made-up” holiday irritated me.
To be sure, it’s not simply Ann Coulter who espouses this opinion. A broad spectrum of Christians have spoken out against this particular celebration. Some, such as Slate’s
If Christians want to fight Kwanzaa because they perceive it as a threat to Christmas, I can certainly understand that. I mean, it would be horrible for a group to put their holiday at the same time as some other group’s major winter celebration for the purpose of subverting it and converting its followers. Sure, that’s exactly what the Christian church did, but that was a long time ago and we should all forget about that.
What bugs me about Coulter’s and McAfee’s and everyone else’s argument that Kwanzaa is a made-up holiday is this:
Every holiday that exists today, or that has ever existed, has been a made-up holiday.
The way that these people talk, a “real” holiday like Christmas exists on its own in nature, independent of the group that celebrates it. Maybe the people who have recently discovered a new species of monkeys in the Amazon could keep their eyes out for a previously unknown holiday lurking in the wild. We could use something to fill the gap between New Year’s Day and Memorial Day; perhaps the Mekong Delta holds a natural, genuine, not-made-up-by-humans holiday for us.
I’m being facetious, of course. The fact is that every holiday is an artificial construction. Christmas didn’t always exist, it was created by people. The same goes for Chanukah, Ramadan, Easter, the Fourth of July, Presidents Day, Martin Luther King Day and every other holiday.
But of course, the War on Kwanzaa isn’t about it being a “synthetic holiday.” It’s about Cristians’ persecution complex. To the paranoid followers of Jesus, the threat from Kwanzaa is just as real and just as insidious as the threat from secularists who want to see other groups represented in the decorations on public property, or the threat from evolution, or the threat from Muslims, or the threat from gays. The list goes on.
So as you take down the Christmas decorations and box them up for next year, dragging the tree out to the curb, take a moment to consider that not a single piece of this most popular holiday is original to Christians, and that the entire thing was invented (well ok, stolen from the pagans) by the church.
If you’re interested in the history of Christmas, you may want to check out one of these books: