Letters From Bobby

Today, Dec. 26th, marks the first day of Kwanzaa. I’m sure you’ll hear about it on local TV newscasts and there are cards for it in your local drugstores, but you may not know what it is. Kwanzaa is a week-long cultural celebration rooted in African tradition. Once a “down-low” holiday, it’s become nationally recognized. When it rates a Hallmark card, it’s officially off the “down-low” or Kathy Griffin D-List. The Kwanzaa cultural holiday started in 1966 on the West Coast. The Black academic who came up with the idea was, if I remember correctly, Prof. Booraka Saki Wansum C. Phoodmama, formerly known as Tyrone Jackson.

This is why I generally don’t get excited about Kwanzaa like I do about Christmas morning. Kwanzaa stresses that you purchase and give inexpensive gifts to your Black family and friends the last week of December. Like I need some of my relatives to be any cheaper than they already are. That professor in Berkeley, California must have been crazy when he told my people to go out Kwanzaa shopping on the day after Christmas, when everything is marked down, and look for a low-cost Kwanzaa gift. It’s like this — if Oprah had a “My Favorite Things: Kwanzaa Edition” special, she’d be shouting “Come on out, ghetto elves! Everybody gets a bag of one dozen white cotton gym socks! YOU get a bag! YOU get a bag! YOU get a bag!”

I get the essence of the cultural celebration, however I feel we should upscale each other. In fact, the new slogan should be “give a gift that could be opened on Oprah” or “Bling! Went the Strings of My Heart.” But that’s just me.

It’s Christmas Eve, my darlings! Tonight, millions of us will hope that a big, burly man will bring his swinging sack into our homes and pull out something that will make us smile. Merry Christmas — a very Merry Christmas to you all. Enjoy it and make this Christmas a memorable one for, next year, Santa Claus could be homeless because of global warming and the reindeer could be weak from malnutrition. Since our president has turned his back on environmental issues, next year Donder and Blitzen could look just like the Olsen twins. With antlers. Frankly, I’m concerned.

Have you seen any new movies? Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story didn’t make as much money over the weekend as hoped, but it still supplies plenty of silly laughs. Perhaps it’s more a warm weather release than a yuletide one. Nevertheless, I saw it and I haven’t laughed that hard at the sight of a Caucasian penis in years. It kept my interest more than that veddy British romantic epic called Atonement. I know that some national critics are raving about the epically long tracking shot in the evacuation at Dunkirk sequence in the WWII section. But, personally, if I wanted to applaud a Ferris wheel, some horses and a soldier running out of a crowded men’s lavatory to throw up, I’d go to Knott’s Berry Farm in Southern California.

I’ll be going to church later to think about that unmarried female under the age of 18 whose pregnancy became news all over the world. No, not Jamie Lynn Spears — Mary, the mother of Baby Jesus. Mary wasn’t condemned. But, then, she didn’t have her own show on Nickelodeon.

That’s all for now. Let visions of sugarplums dance in your head. We need a little Christmas. May you have someone to hug. Happy holidays.