Happy Hanukwanzmas?

We Unitarian Universalists love holidays.  We love all the festivals of light in December.  We even have a new one of our own, Chalica, celebrating the UU seven principles at the beginning of the month. And people love that, too. At our congregation, we had an (early) Hanukkah celebration, to be followed by two Winter Solstice events and a Christmas Eve service.  We aren't celebrating Kwanzaa this year, but I hear they have enjoyed it in the past.

As an interim minister, I go from congregation to congregation, among other things helping them through the Winter holidays as best I can.  In the last congregation, we tried a Las Posadas holiday pageant, singing the songs in Spanish and getting a little out of our comfort zone.  I confess, it was my doing, and I am not sorry.  In this congregation, I was the instigator of the Christmas Eve service.  Historically humanist, this Fellowship had not gotten around to making a place for its Christians and others for whom that kind of Christmas experience is meaningful.  Turned out that some people who would have wanted it had by-now long standing traditions of getting together with friends and not going to church.  But for new people who haven't established their traditions...can it help?  We'll see..

The trouble is our diversity.  Maybe it's not trouble.  But you know... there are those for whom various December days have special meaning -- St. Nicholas, St. Lucia, the Virgin of Guadalupe -- all depending on the cultural makeup of the community.  With Buddhists in our midst, sometimes we pause to honor Bodhi Day. I have not served a congregation where Diwali was given more than a nod, but for some it's big. And always Hanukkah.  We celebrate the light that would not go out, and the struggle for religious freedom.  We sing and play dreidel and eat latkes. We pray for peace in the Middle East.

There are those who want to make a pagan ceremony at the solstice, and those who want to do something more humanist, celebrating science and truth.  Others just want to have a party.  One congregation did its own mini-Revels every year for which the whole town turned out.  And then it's on to Christmas!  People who are Christian Unitarian Universalists have a variety of theologies, and people who have moved on just slightly from being Christians do, too.  Somehow we weave all this diversity into a fabric of celebration stretches from one end of December to the other.

In the nearly all-white congregations I have been serving lately, Kwanzaa has not seemed like something we need.  Still, the values of Kwanzaa are things I would like to promote among Unitarian Universalists. I'll find a way without having to have white people pretend to be Black and without drafting the already conspicuous few Black people to show us what Black is like (when it's probably not like that).

We close out the season with a New Year's Eve fire communion.  Cast the things that no longer serve you into the fire on little slips of flash paper!  It seems a suitable finale.

With luck and effort, it does hang together and unify most of our theologies, leaving us feeling more whole as a community.  December ends.  The light returns.  There is unity in diversity, and all is well.
Blessed be!