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Students celebrate non-Christian holidays

8 December 2007 | By Chase Johnson, Flat Hat Executive Editor | The Flat Hat » variety

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, and it doesn’t take the keenest observer to know yuletide cheer reigns supreme at the College. But that certainly doesn’t mean Christmas has a monopoly on holiday joy.

As many of her friends string up Christmas lights, Hillel President Alexandra Eichel ’08 summons her Hanukkah spirit with doughnuts and illicit candles.

“We express our amazement for the oil by eating a lot of fried foods,” Eichel said. “Really, no fried foods are off limits. ... One traditional food we always eat is the potato latka.”

One of the most recognizable Hanukkah traditions is the lighting of the menorah each night, a practice encumbered by the College’s pesky policy outlawing candle burning.

“Students often gather in groups to light the menorah each night,” Eichel said. “My freshman year I brought 10 menorahs back to school with me and had the whole hall congregate in my room each night to light them. Everyone loved it.”

Of course, those who celebrate Hanukkah also get to look forward to eight days of presents.

“We also traditionally get presents each night just as part of the celebratory atmosphere,” Eichel said. “Although coinciding with Christmas has definitely overemphasized the importance of presents in this holiday, no one has complained.”

This year, Hanukkah began Dec. 5. The eight-day celebration will extend into the first week of finals.

“It’s hard to be in the Hanukkah spirit with all of the stress of school and finals,” Eichel said.

Ramadan is another prominent holiday celebrated on campus. Yet, unlike Hanukkah — and Christmas for that matter — Ramadan doesn’t lend itself to overindulgence.

“It’s a month to cleanse, to purify, to strengthen your will and endurance,” Muslim Student Association President Selma Alamin ’08 said. “It’s a chance to remember those less fortunate and focus on more than just food, nourishing your mind and spirit.”

Alamin said that the difficulty of fasting makes each meal after sundown special.

“It’s difficult to fast alone,” she said. “That’s why MSA sponsored weekly iftaar meals [breakfasts] during Ramadan and hopefully created a network for Muslim students to eat every day with others who were also fasting.”

As wtih Hanukkah, the exact date of Ramadan changes in relation to the 12-month calendar traditionally used in the U.S. This year, it began Sept. 13.

“[We] celebrate Eid al-adha, which is the celebration of the sacrifice, and will be celebrated December 20,” Alamin said. “It’s a celebration of sacrifice and giving zakat (alms [or] charity) and following Abraham’s example and eating a lot of lamb.”

Unlike Ramadan, Hanukkah and Christmas, the Kwanzaa holiday doesn’t have a religious backdrop.

In fact, Kwanzaa’s history is relatively new. It was created and first celebrated in 1966 by a black author and political activist named Ron Karenga.

“Kwanzaa reflects the traditional customs and values of Africa combined with those in America,” Director of Multicultural Affairs Chon Glover said. “It is an opportunity to celebrate what we have, to give thanks and to reflect on the new year.”

Kwanzaa is celebrated from Dec. 26 to Jan. 1 each year, one day for each of the seven principles for which Kwanzaa stands — unity, self-determination, collective work, cooperative economics, creativity, purpose and faith. Each night during Kwanzaa, families gather to light one candle on the kinara, which is similar to a menorah.

Although Karenga originally described Kwanzaa as a “Black alternative to the holiday,” Kwanzaa is now considered open to all.

“I think it is typically celebrated by African Americans,” Glover said. “But anyone can celebrate it.”

  1. Hanukkah? Ramadan? I don’t understand…are there students of different faiths at the College of William and Mary? When did this happen?! I thought W&M was a Protestant seminary, hence why it was so important to keep the cross displayed in the Wren Building at all times. I surely shall never donate to the College ever again. Sic Semper Nichol!


    — Jim Jones    Dec 30, 06:27 AM    #

  2. Interesting history of Kwanzaa from Ann Coulter – maybe even a speech-code violation under the new Bias Crime Reporting System.

    Kwanzaa: Holiday From the FBI
    by Ann Coulter

    Posted: 01/02/2008

    Is it just me, or does Kwanzaa seem to come earlier and earlier each year? The same goes for the Iowa caucuses — the early scheduling of which forced me to run an attack on a synthetic candidate, rather than a synthetic holiday, last week.

    I’ve seen so few mentions of Kwanzaa this year, I was going to declare my campaign a success, but I see that President Bush issued another absurd Kwanzaa message this year, referring to millions of African-Americans gathering to celebrate Kwanzaa.

    I believe more African-Americans spent this season reflecting on the birth of Christ than some phony non-Christian holiday invented a few decades ago by an FBI stooge. Kwanzaa is a holiday for white liberals, not blacks.

    It is a fact that Kwanzaa was invented in 1966 by a black radical FBI stooge, Ron Karenga, aka Dr. Maulana Karenga. Karenga was a founder of United Slaves, a violent nationalist rival to the Black Panthers and a dupe of the FBI.

    In what was probably ultimately a foolish gamble, during the madness of the ’60s the FBI encouraged the most extreme black nationalist organizations in order to discredit and split the left. The more preposterous the organization, the better. Using that criterion, Karenga’s United Slaves was perfect. In the annals of the American ’60s, Karenga was the Father Gapon, stooge of the czarist police.
    Despite modern perceptions that blend all the black activists of the ’60s, the Black Panthers did not hate whites. They did not seek armed revolution. Those were the precepts of Karenga’s United Slaves. United Slaves were proto-fascists, walking around in dashikis, gunning down Black Panthers and adopting invented “African” names. (That was a big help to the black community: How many boys named “Jamal” currently sit on death row?)

    Whether Karenga was a willing dupe, or just a dupe, remains unclear. Curiously, in a 1995 interview with Ethnic NewsWatch, Karenga matter-of-factly explained that the forces out to get O.J. Simpson for the “framed” murder of two whites included: “the FBI, the CIA, the State Department, Interpol, the Chicago Police Department” and so on. Karenga should know about FBI infiltration. (He further noted that the evidence against O.J. “was not strong enough to prohibit or eliminate unreasonable doubt” — an interesting standard of proof.)

    In the category of the-gentleman-doth-protest-too-much, back in the ’70s, Karenga was quick to criticize rumors that black radicals were government-supported. When Nigerian newspapers claimed that some American black radicals were CIA operatives, Karenga publicly denounced the idea, saying, “Africans must stop generalizing about the loyalties and motives of Afro-Americans, including the widespread suspicion of black Americans being CIA agents.”

    Now we know that the FBI fueled the bloody rivalry between the Panthers and United Slaves. In one barbarous outburst, Karenga’s United Slaves shot to death Black Panthers Al “Bunchy” Carter and Deputy Minister John Huggins on the UCLA campus. Karenga himself served time, a useful stepping-stone for his current position as a black studies professor at California State University at Long Beach.

    (Sing to “Jingle Bells”)

    Kwanzaa bells, dashikis sell

    Whitey has to pay;

    Burning, shooting, oh what fun

    On this made-up holiday!

    Kwanzaa itself is a lunatic blend of schmaltzy ’60s rhetoric, black racism and Marxism. Indeed, the seven “principles” of Kwanzaa praise collectivism in every possible arena of life — economics, work, personality, even litter removal. (“Kuumba: Everyone should strive to improve the community and make it more beautiful.”) It takes a village to raise a police snitch.

    When Karenga was asked to distinguish Kawaida, the philosophy underlying Kwanzaa, from “classical Marxism,” he essentially explained that under Kawaida, we also hate whites. While taking the “best of early Chinese and Cuban socialism” — which one assumes would exclude the forced abortions, imprisonment of homosexuals and forced labor — Kawaida practitioners believe one’s racial identity “determines life conditions, life chances and self-understanding.” There’s an inclusive philosophy for you.

    Coincidentally, the seven principles of Kwanzaa are the very same seven principles of the Symbionese Liberation Army, another charming invention of the Worst Generation. In 1974, Patricia Hearst, kidnap victim-cum-SLA revolutionary, posed next to the banner of her alleged captors, a seven-headed cobra. Each snake head stood for one of the SLA’s revolutionary principles: Umoja, Kujichagulia, Ujima, Ujamaa, Nia, Kuumba and Imani — the exact same seven “principles” of Kwanzaa.

    With his Kwanzaa greetings, President Bush is saluting the intellectual sibling of the Symbionese Liberation Army, killer of housewives and police. He is saluting the founder of United Slaves, who were such lunatics that they shot Panthers for not being sufficiently insane — all with the FBI as their covert ally.

    It’s as if David Duke invented a holiday called “Anglika,” and the president of the United States issued a presidential proclamation honoring the synthetic, racist holiday. People might well stand up and take notice if that happened.

    Kwanzaa was the result of a ’60s psychosis grafted onto the black community. Liberals have become so mesmerized by multicultural nonsense that they have forgotten the real history of Kwanzaa and Karenga’s United Slaves — the violence, the Marxism, the insanity. Most absurdly, for leftists anyway, is that they have forgotten the FBI’s tacit encouragement of this murderous black nationalist cult founded by the father of Kwanzaa.

    Now the “holiday” concocted by an FBI dupe is honored in a presidential proclamation and public schools across the nation. In Oregon public schools this year, Kwanzaa — but not Christmas — appeared on the official calendar.

    Bush called Kwanzaa a holiday that promotes “unity” and “faith.” Faith in what? Liberals’ unbounded capacity to respect any faith but Christianity?

    A movement that started approximately 2,000 years before Kwanzaa leaps well beyond mere “unity” and “faith” to proclaim that we are all equal before God. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). It was practitioners of that faith who were at the forefront of the abolitionist and civil rights movements. But that’s all been washed down the memory hole, along with the true origins of Kwanzaa.

    Ann Coulter is Legal Affairs Correspondent for HUMAN EVENTS and author of “High Crimes and Misdemeanors,” “Slander,” ““How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must),” “Godless,” and most recently, “If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans.”


    — Greg    Jan 3, 03:34 PM    #