By Dionne Ford

A couple of days before Christmas last year, my daughters pleaded for a Kwanzaa celebration. (I think they were under the impression that a second holiday meant twice the gifts). Outwardly, I was excited that my oldest daughter—who describes herself as white although she is biracial—was interested in this celebration of African culture.

But inside, I was racked with anxiety. As a black woman almost 40, I felt ashamed that I had never celebrated the holiday. What was the proper way to celebrate? Could I pull it all together in two days? And were we, a mixed race family, qualified to partake in it?

I sent out emails to friends and church members who I thought might celebrate, but no luck. I tried to track down a store in a nearby town that I was told would have everything I needed from the kinara (candle holder) to Mishumaa Saba, the black, red and green candles, but they’d gone out of business. The bustle of buying final Christmas gifts, attending holiday parties at the kids’ schools and with friends sidetracked me. By the time the first night of the seven-day celebration with its corresponding principles rolled around, I didn’t even have a piece of kente cloth to cover my dining room table, where our Kwanzaa symbols would be displayed.

Growing up, my family never celebrated Kwanzaa, which was created in 1966, three years before I was born. As a black girl in a predominantly white neighborhood, I didn’t know anyone else who did. When I’d entertain the idea of celebrating the holiday as I got older, the voices of childhood friends telling me I wasn’t really black because of the neighborhood I lived in and the way I acted would fill my head, reinforcing that Kwanzaa wasn’t for me. I felt like a fraud.

Maybe old ambivalence about how black I really am was subconsciously weighing on my daughter, pushing her to see herself as more white than black. Maybe if I could pull off a perfect Kwanzaa celebration, I could help her embrace her black side and quiet those imposter voices in my head once and for all.

For three days, I studied the official Kwanzaa website and drove around town trying to track down African objects for the altar, traditional clothes for the seventh day feast, and Zawadi, gifts to represent each of Kwanzaa’s seven principles to give to my daughters. My self-determination (Kujichagulia,the second Kwanzaa principle) dwindled as I returned home each evening with only Muhindi (corn, an ear for each child in the house), Mazoa (fruits and vegetables signifying the origins of Kwanzaa) and a few children’s books for the girls.

It wasn’t until day four that I lucked upon a beautifully carved kimkombe cha ummoja (unity cup to honor the ancestors) and matching kinara in a clothing store. They reminded me of the mahogany statues my father brought back from Ethiopia, where he had been stationed in the Air Force before I was born. As a child, I spent countless hours staring at the carved man clenching a spear and naked woman with sharp pointy breasts squatting deep in a warrior pose from their perch on our dining room sideboard. I loved how fierce the woman looked, more so than her male counterpart, even though all she had was her stance and not a weapon to protect her. But they hadn’t survived our family’s move from south to north New Jersey in the 80s. Just like the African culture swallowed up by the middle passage, that Dr. Maulana Karenga tried to restore by creating Kwanzaa.

I drove to my weekly women’s spirituality meeting that night, pining away for the lost African treasures of my youth and even my own African heritage. Winding through the darkening suburban streets, I wondered if the mostly white women’s group would understand.

The point of the group is to talk about whatever is on your mind in relation to your spiritual journey, but as only one of two African Americans in the group that night, I felt uncomfortable discussing Kwanzaa. Halfway through the discussion, I finally shared: “I want to celebrate Kwanzaa, but I don’t know how, I’m ashamed that I don’t know how and it’s already three days into the celebration and I don’t even have a piece of kente cloth in my house.”

When I finished, a white woman raised her hand and shared first about her financial concerns—her son had been accepted into an ivy-league school and although he received some scholarship funds, she feared she couldn’t afford the tuition on her school counselor salary. What a great problem to have, I thought. I sunk down in my chair, thinking I shouldn’t have shared about Kwanzaa; my group didn’t understand. The white woman who’d been speaking then turned to me and said she’d been celebrating Kwanzaa with her son, biracial like my kids, for years. Not only did she have an extra piece of kente cloth, but she also had a wooden statue of an African woman carrying fruit on her head that I could borrow for my altar.

That night, my family gathered around our dining room table, my oldest daughter lit the first four candles (with my help) and read the definition of the fourth principle, Ujamaa, cooperative economics from the Kwanzaa kid book I gave her as a gift from our local bookstore.

Our symbols were placed on top of two mkekas (the mat on which all the other symbols rest) which my daughters had made in church the day before. That’s why we’d picked that church in the first place—it was non-traditional like us and it embraced everyone and all their traditions. That’s what I liked about my women’s circle too. We were all on a collective spiritual journey to find our own individual higher powers.

Looking at my diverse family under the warm glow of our Kwanzaa candles, from my husband’s blue eyes and red hair to my cocoa skin and coal black eyes, to our butterscotch daughters with their copper-colored curls, I felt at peace. We were the actualization of Kujichagulia, Kwanzaa’s second principle of self-determination. My family is defining itself, including my daughter who can call herself whatever she wants. We don’t neatly fit into one category and that, like our Kwanzaa celebration is just perfect.

Dionne Ford is a writer living in Montclair, NJ. She blogs about her family’s history at findingjosephine.com