The Kwanzaa Collection: Cops, Crack Rock and Why My Mama Doesn’t Have a Kwanzaa Cup
More stories about the greatest holiday since Juneteenth.
This Kwanzaa, we’re sharing the complete collection of stories about the greatest holiday since Juneteenth. This post was originally published on Dec. 27, 2018.
The thing you must know about Kwanzaa is that it really isn’t seven times the holiday that Christmas is, because, although you receive gifts every day during Kwanzaa, the Kwanzaa haul isn’t really as lucrative as the Christmas haul.
No one in the history of Kujichagulia has ever received a bike for Kwanzaa. Kwanzaa gifts are kinda shitty. They’re often handmade and meant to embody the Kwanzaa principles. Sometimes my family bucked the trend. The best Kwanzaa gift I ever received was a kid-sized acoustic guitar that my cousin Tyran melted a little bit by using it as a fireplace poker one time. It still played pretty good, though.
Or, one time, my grandma gave me and Tyran matching boom boxes. Well, they weren’t really boom boxes, per se. They didn’t really boom, nor did they have cassette decks. It was more of a blah box. But I still appreciated it.
My mom would also give us some money to purchase or make Kwanzaa gifts. It wasn’t a lot because we didn’t have a lot. But still, I kinda got excited about Kwanzaa gifts because the challenge was giving something that matched the Kwanzaa principle and making the receiver happy. If there’s one thing I can say about Kwanzaa, I must admit that it has made me an excellent giver of gifts.
Anyway, this is the story of how police brutality, Bell Biv Devoe and the illegal cocaine trade prevented me from giving my mama a Kwanzaa gift.
