Made up stuff

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

I don't celebrate Kwanzaa. I only celebrate Christmas because of my wife and son. I generally don't like holidays. And while I come from a family of black radicals, my Dad generally derided Kwanzaa as "fake Christmas." The holiday season in the Coates house generally meant more time for work. (Sadly it's becoming that in my household too.) 

With that said, Kwanzaa-hating has always struck me as the most bougie and snobbish of holiday traditions. It's that cool that Jonathan Safran Foer thinks that "no one is quite sure what Kwanzaa is,"  but I'm not sure "what Hanukkah is." And for most of my life, no one I knew was quite sure either.  I'm only barely sure "what Christmas is." (Celebrating the birth of your savoir with an orgy of consumption?) 

It's just seems bizarre in America, of all places, to stand on vintage. Has there ever been a more mongrel, more made-up, country that this one? Have there ever been two more "made up people" then the "white race" and the "black race?" This country is a mongrel mess--and its traditions are too. That's the whole charm of the thing. No one who takes the Easter Bunny seriously should mock Kwanzaa. This is about equality. Black people have right to make shit up, just as white people have the right to make shit up.