Happy Kwanzaa — Or Is That Greeting Proper?

I suggest there is a strong reason it has failed to become airborne. This is not your father’s Martin Luther King Day. Even a small, slow child knows the other two holidays of this season, Christmas and Chanukah, highlight victory, birth and hope. Ain’t no ambiguity or dispute about any of those descriptions. Conversely, the true meaning of Kwanzaa seems dense and elusive. Unlike — here we go again — “the other two holidays,” Kwanzaa is secular and blurred, perhaps deliberately. The heart of Kwanzaa fits Winston Churchill’s characterization of the old Soviet Union, a mystery wrapped in an enigma.

Postscript

Can Kwanzaa be saved? Should it be? Possibly a marketing genius somewhere in the heartland will emerge and judge the good ship Kwanzaa is sinking faster than Saddam’s lifetime magazine subscriptions. Tell me. How can a holiday founded by a cheerless, separation-minded man, timed to coincide with the party season for gang members, succeed? It isn’t bad. It isn’t wrong, heaven forbid. Just hollow.