The other night Sophie and I were reading her book-in-a-bag, the book that comes home from school every night. It’s a different book each time, and we read it together, talk about it, and then write down what we talked about and she takes it back to school. Well, this particular book was about the Underground Railroad, so when Sophie saw that the person in the book was black, this sparked a thought, because she interrupted me and said, “Mommy! The red candle in Kwanzaa is for struggle, and the black candle is for black” {um, not sure she got that right}, “and the green candle stands for HOPES and DREAMS!” (She got really excited about the hopes and dreams!)
And so I learned that Sophie has been paying attention at school to her multicultural holiday education. The next day she came home and excitedly said, “Mommy! Guess what?? Kamri celebrates Kwanzaa because she has BLACK SKIN!” Kamri is one of Sophie’s good buddies, and she does, in fact have black skin. So does one of Sophie’s teachers and another classmate (her class is very racially mixed, with Hispanic and Caucasians tied for majority). So I said, “Do Mr. G and Honest’I celebrate Kwanzaa too?” and she said, “Nope, just Kamri.” It kind of cracked me up, because it didn’t seem to bother her that those two didn’t celebrate Kwanzaa even though they also had “black skin”. Then today, she told me rather longingly that she wished we could also celebrate Kwanzaa. I think she’s just aiming for more presents, though.
Next, her class moved on to Christmas, however the extent of their education on Christmas was Santa coming to visit class and the making of a stocking. This was kind of confusing to Sophie because we’ve never tried to pull the whole Santa thing over on our kids, and we just told them that he is pretend. Only now, she thinks he is real because CLEARLY he came to her school. Hmm. Good thing we have our nativity scene, Advent calendar, and you know, Bible at home. Not too mention the many books we read to try to explain about Jesus’ birth.
Next, her class moved on to Hannukah. “Mom, Hannukah is another holiday. And it has candles TOO! But it’s not right now, but it’s in a few days. And we played a Hanukkah game with pretzels! And we made a dreidel!” That’s all the info I got on Hannukah, though when she came home Wednesday with her dreidel, Kwanzaa mat, and stocking that she had made over the past few weeks, she was rather jazzed about them all.
Truth be told, as funny as Sophie’s interpretations of what she is learning about at school are, I am really glad she IS learning about other families’ traditions, and that she thinks it’s all awesome. Obviously, we celebrate Christmas and we believe in Christ, but it’s excellent for her to start to learn and understand about the different people in our very urban part of town.
And it sure is cute to hear her explain all about what she’s learning.
So whatever holiday you celebrate, I hope you have a very happy one! And should you be short one Kwanzaa mat at your holiday table…well, Sophie might let you borrow hers! If there’s a present in it for her.
