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For a few years of my childhood, Kwanzaa was a big deal. I recall attending three Kwanzaa celebrations hosted by Mt. Lebanon Baptist Church in Baltimore. My cousin Olivia Moyd Hazell, at the time the church’s director of Christian education, organized them. About 50 church members and friends, many wearing kente cloth, would file into a softly lit basement the weekend after Christmas. We’d listen to good music: Black R&B standards, Soul Train dance lines, and traditional djembe performed live. We’d eat familiar food, like collard greens and red beans and rice. And we’d speak unfamiliar words such as umoja and ujima. The mood was festive, but with a focus on giving everyone, children especially, time to speak about how the principles of Kwanzaa applied to their lives.

Then it all just kind of stopped. My family participated in this big Kwanzaa tradition, and then we didn’t. But, as fringe and out of style as Kwanzaa may be, I wish we’d take it up again.

Kwanzaa, which begins on December 26, is a seven-day, nonreligious holiday inspired by African “first fruits” festivals that focus on appreciation for what the earth provides. There’s a candleholder, or kinara—Swahili is the chosen language of the holiday—with seven candles representing the seven principles of Kwanzaa: unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, and faith. The holiday had a moment in the ’70s, and then again in the ’90s. But by the time my family was celebrating, in the 2000s, Kwanzaa was decisively on the decline. The reported numbers of Kwanzaa observers have varied widely since its inception—from half a million to 12 million—with recent reports suggesting that about one-fifth of Black Americans celebrate, which seems like an overestimate.

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The holiday’s fortunes have tracked broader trends in African American life. Kwanzaa was born in 1966, during the ascendancy of the Black Power movement and the rise of Afrocentricity. Those ideas have since faded within the Black community, and so has the attraction of Kwanzaa. As the Gift of Gab rapped in 1999, “And them red, black, and green medallions / Was all just part of a trend, I guess / Hardly ever seem them around brothers’ necks no more.”

Kwanzaa’s legitimacy also suffered from the reputation of its creator, Maulana Karenga, who conceived of the holiday in the aftermath of the Watts riots in Los Angeles, where he lived. Five years later, Karenga was convicted of kidnapping and torturing two women within the Black-nationalist organization that he co-founded. He served four years in prison.

When I asked some of my family members why we stopped observing Kwanzaa, nobody brought up Karenga. Instead, the question was met with sighs and shrugs. “I think once the newness of it wears off, you might want to do something else,” my grandma told me. “And with the celebration that they just did for Christmas—by that time, they was all celebrated out.” My mother, who used to display a kinara in our house every December, said that no single moment or event made her drop Kwanzaa cold turkey. She thinks the momentum fizzled out after Cousin Olivia stopped throwing public parties through church, instead hosting them at her home.

Whatever the reason for its decline, today Kwanzaa feels like a punch line: a Black Nationalist pseudo-holiday, a pastiche of Christmas and Hanukkah in which Black Americans with flimsy cultural connections to West Africa play dress-up in the generalized attire of a vast and diverse region. It isn’t taken seriously as an annual ritual in the way that Thanksgiving and even Valentine’s Day are. From a national perspective, Kwanzaa seems to have become an eccentric and slightly corny footnote. The viral fame of Sandra Lee’s infamously unappetizing Kwanzaa cake—which featured canned apple-pie filling and, inexplicably, a hefty sprinkle of corn nuts—might be the last time the holiday had any national relevance.  

But Kwanzaa still has so much to offer. It’s the only holiday that attempts to create and sustain a sense of shared Black identity. True, the “Black community” is not monolithic—but neither is the Catholic or Jewish or Mexican or Irish American community. And that’s kind of the point: A cultural holiday can help forge common bonds among the heterogeneous members of the same group. That’s especially important for Black Americans, whose ancestral knowledge was violently stolen from us for hundreds of years.

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Does it feel a little strange, as a third generation Baltimorean, to put on a kente tunic once a year and light some multicolored candles? Yeah. But there’s a deeper meaning to it. Seeing a bunch of Black people packed snugly in a church basement, talking about Africa and building a strong community, had a real effect on me as a kid, and I want more Black people to have that feeling. Kwanzaa helps us acknowledge where we came from, and reminds us that our history didn’t start in the hulls of slave ships or on the banks of Virginia. As welcome as the recent spike in interest in fighting anti-Black racism has been, Blackness involves much more than that struggle. Kwanzaa’s principles of self-determination and collective responsibility emphasize that we are more than just the victims of oppression; while knowing our past is vital, our identity doesn’t revolve around white folk and the many sins they’ve committed against us.

I can understand why so many Black people feel uncomfortable with the overt Afrocentricity of Kwanzaa. Why should Black diasporans with European names who have never set foot on African soil have any reason to “reaffirm and restore African heritage and culture,” as Karenga put it? As Robbyn Mitchell wrote for the Tampa Bay Times in 2015, “My history is America’s history. Africa is an ocean away, and I feel no need to look there for inspiration.”

To me, this is a false choice. Black people can celebrate our Africanness without diminishing our Americanness. In fact, our understanding of the latter is incomplete if we lose sight of the former. The drum patterns that West African slaves used to communicate with one another when they were first taken to North America became the foundations of jazz—one of the crowning artistic achievements of American culture, not just Black culture—and later of hip-hop. We still taste the influence of West African cooking in the traditional dishes we eat today. Yes, it’s fair to criticize people who celebrate Kwanzaa for conflating different West African traditions and being hazy on their African history. But a people that has no real way to specify its origins needs to work with what it has. Nor should Black Americans feel embarrassed because they can’t pinpoint the precise region their ancestors were stolen from.

So this year, among my friends and family, Kwanzaa is coming back. We may not come close to duplicating my cousin Olivia’s old events, and we may not even observe all seven days of Kwanzaa. But, while working on this article, I pestered my mother so much that she decided to bring the kinara out of storage, and that’s a good start. Next year, who knows—maybe we’ll rock the kente cloth, too.