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| Joyous First Day of Kwanzaa from Shanna! |
First of all, yes, I know you haven't seen Felicity, Naomi, Otters, or Abbi in their holiday finery--or any of the sets I've crafted, such as for Elizabeth and Charlotte. And you've already seen Shanna. But it hit me, as I was snapping pictures for the next reviews, that December 26th was the first day of Kwanzaa. And that I had the perfect outfit and accessory set to review that day. So I dug it out and the others are willing to wait some on their reviews to give this festival some focus. Because my gang is generous like that.
There's always the running theme that no one knows what the hell Kwanzaa is, or that it's not a "real" holiday because it came into fruition in recent history. Bull to the shit. We live in a world where you can Google who that actress who died after voicing that animated movie back in 1988
1 and people are celebrating Patriot Day on September 11th which hasn't been around long enough to drink. So no. Stop being a brat and learn you a thing.
Kwanzaa is a week-long celebration from December 26th to January 1st among the African diaspora, in particular among African-Americans in the US. It celebrates family, culture, community, and ties back to African culture and its continued influence on black people in a world that tried to stamp the culture out of us with every method possible. The name Kwanzaa derives from the Swahili phrase
matunda ya kwanza, meaning "first fruits of the harvest;" Swahili was one of the major African Languages that got latched on in the 60s for black people since it is very African in a way many languages aren't. I tend to do my first fruits celebration on Lammas, but it made for a nice name for the festival. The holiday was developed by Maulana Karenga as an alternative holiday
to Christmas, and first celebrated in 1966-1967 in the rising wake of
Black consciousness, the rejection of whiteness and European supremacy,
and part of the reaffirmation of blackness as beautiful and worthy of
celebration. Many black people, rather than having the festival as a
total Giftmas replacement, append it onto the holiday. Part of the purpose of and drive behind this festival is because most of the African diaspora cannot trace their heritage before slavery or the Slave Trade--a nice way to say "that part of history where Europe was full of a bunch of lazy motherfuckers who barged into North America, decided that since it was too hard to enslave the Native Americans to work like fucking animals because they either kept dying or running off and hiding, and thus decided they would just import Africans for the job and keep them enslaved for hundreds of years." Ahem. That's the
femmenoir enrageous I have.
I have never really actively celebrated Kwanzaa. My mother would give us small gifts every day of Kwanzaa--things like earrings, nail polish, black heritage books, or my first wine cooler when I was fifteen--and we'd discuss the
Nguzu Saba or the seven principles of African Heritage. But we were pretty private about it. (When I was younger, my family and I went to a First Day of Kwanzaa
festival, but it was a poorly planned hot mess with no actual community so much as it was "watch the people of our organization talk and do things without integrating anyone else," and my mother
doesn't like that, and so we never went back to another one.) We never owned a kinara and I still don't own a functional one, though that will change soon. As I said yesterday, several aspects of pan-Africanism--especially as misinterpreted to result in misogynoir and stereotypes--rubbed me the wrong way for years. I'm a little ashamed to say that several years ago, I was actively against Kwanzaa celebration. Partially due to this being pushed on me as the "Black Hanukkah" or the Black substitute to Christmas or people making fun of me for wanting to do so. And I was told that either I wasn't really black for not giving my all to every aspect of Kwanzaa, including the sexist, abusive, and homophobic aspects--and at the same time I was being "too" black by wanting to do any aspects of it.
2 But I want to change that and start to celebrate Kwanzaa--I will probably be adding pagan aspects to the celebration--and so I'm starting that this year. Today's principle is
Umoja, or Unity: wanting to do one's best to maintain and hold
on to unity and connections among family, communities, and the diaspora. So I'm starting that unity with my AG Kwanzaa set. We all gotta pick it back up somewhere.
In 1996 AG, realizing that maybe a ballet outfit was not an exemplary holiday outfit for a modern historical unless we were all going to be writing stories about ten-year-olds dancing in the school performance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, released three outfits that actually were more holiday focused: the Hanukkah Outfit (also called the Winter Festival Outfit and thus maintaining some neutrality for non-Jewish people), the Chinese New Year Outfit, and the
Kwanzaa Outfit. Each had its own set of accessories and thus the Kwanzaa Outfit had the
Kwanzaa Decorations. The Kwanzaa Outfit consisted of a headwrap, West African kaftan dress, beaded necklace, and leather thong sandals for a cost of $22; the accessories consisted of the kinara (candle holder), seven candles, two ears of corn, a mat, the unity cup, three pieces of fruit, a woven basket, and a doll sized book for $20. Both were retired in 1999 and since then AG has not done anything cultural for Kwanzaa since. (As for Chinese New Year, there's Ivy's set and...that's it. [sarcasm]Wow.[/sarcasm])
My set was gifted to me by a buddy in 2007 with both the outfit and all the items except the kinara and candles at a good time as I was seriously trying to reconnect to the celebration even though I wasn't quite there yet; she found it on eBay and asked if I was okay not having a kinara and I told her I'd make one--which I did out of Sculpy and wire. At the time my nine girl gang only had Addy and Otters as my black girls--Otters having a white grandmother. So Addy chose to wear the set the first time as she agreed that it looks like what her great-grandmother from Nigeria would wear and here she is into pan-Africanism and the celebration of black culture. Edith joined Addy in 2008 but her historical period is literally just shy of the first Kwanzaa--her first book is set late summer 1964
3 --and so she didn't quite work to wear it, and by the time Mellie came along I was still in that wobbly period of not sure about celebrating Kwanzaa. But this year, Shanna and I decided to celebrate our heritage and I think this will be her set from now on.
Because people who list things on eBay can often be morons or don't research what they list--a good thing and a bad thing--this often gets labeled as "Addy's Kwanzaa Set" because Addy is the most recognized Black AG.
4 The outfit generally shows up on eBay near retail with just the kaftan and headwrap, pretty frequently with the shoes and necklace, and often several of the accessories have been stuffed in as well with nearly no change in price or less than the original $42 a full set would have been--but almost never the kinara and candles, and if I didn't have images of it I'd swear it was a fantasy that they ever existed. It doesn't show up a lot because most of the AG collecting community is white or really bad about black things, and I'm actually not too irritated about it. I really hackles up about white people fucking up or messing around in Kwanzaa and being appropriative. It's our celebration. Not everything is for y'all. Some things white people need to just let us have, gods damn it. If we're willing to share with you, that's one thing, but stop looking in our bowl, you already have
all the other jellybeans.
You can see white goop around the base of my kinara candles, which will be discussed and add a Crafting Creatively aspect to this post. This is because the kinara was made with non removable candles, I broke three, reglued them and reinforced the base with Tacky Glue, and at the time of my pictures the setting hadn't dried clear.
