Funny but true stuff from the Washington Post‘s Jonathan Capehart, who says Tea Party guy Glenn Grothman may be a right-wing bomb-thrower, but he’s right about Kwanzaa. Excerpt:

When a well-meaning white friend sent me a Kwanzaa card a few years back, I was enraged for hours. A Christmas card would have done nicely. My disdain for the holiday runs so deep that when Kwanzaa was the answer in the game Heads Up, my clue was “made up black holiday!” My teammate answered the question without a nanosecond’s hesitation. The ensuing laughter can only be described as uncontrollable.

But don’t confuse my Kwanzaa sneering for 100 percent agreement with Grothman. The conservative Republican sees Kwanzaa as part of a vast left-wing conspiracy to divide the nation, play the race card or whatever else race-fearing right-wingers think.  I see it as another sincere yet misguided effort by African Americans to forge a connection to an ancestral home they know nothing about. Sure, the principles of “unity,” “self-determination” and “collective work and responsibility” are excellent. But did we really need Kwanzaa to imbue us with these values? Do we really need to light a candle each day and recite a word in a language we’ve never spoken or know anything about to reaffirm a sense of community and resilience?

The older I get, the more frustrated I find myself becoming with all communal holidays, even the old ones. Don’t get me wrong, I love the Christmas season, but the more I go into the stores or dip into pop culture, the more I recoil from all that forced cheer. So much of the joy seems so manufactured to sell us something, or rather, to frog-march us toward a mood that softens us up for salesmanship. Christmas is the worst offender, but our culture has this general attitude towards all holidays, don’t you think? Maybe I’m wrong about this. Christmas is a real holiday, not an artificial holiday like Kwanzaa, which exists to serve cultural politics. But I don’t think that the division between the two is as bright and clear as we might like to think. Aside from the cultural politics of Christmas (e.g., the “War on Christmas”), there is more importantly the matter of the holiday existing to serve the culture’s commercial interests, and our desires to see color and light and experience cheer. There is nothing wrong with wanting color and light and cheer! That’s why I love the Christmas season. But having worshipped these last two years in an Orthodox parish that follows the Old Calendar (which puts out Christmas in January), as discomforting as that can be, it really does highlight the difference between “Christmas” as we celebrate it, and the Nativity.