Or, why the Kwanzaa Collective will be blowing up my phone soon.
By Denise Clay-Murray
On Thursday, the City of Philadelphia began its celebration of the holiday season with the Christmas tree lighting in Wawa’s Holiday Plaza, sponsored by 6ABC.
(If that sentence doesn’t tell you how sponsored and commercial this particular tradition has become, nothing is going to. Wawa is about to close yet another store in Center City, and yet, the chain’s name is on everything. How about putting it on some stores downtown so I don’t have to walk all over the city to use my points for a French Vanilla coffee?)
It was a nice affair with Keyshia Cole performing and all the fun, frolic, and hot chocolate you can expect from something like a tree lighting.
The holidays in Philadelphia are a cavalcade of traditions. The Christmas Village has taken over LOVE Park and the folks on the other side of the Portal located there are getting an eye full of people drinking hot chocolate and mulled wine, performances from musicians brave enough to perform in the cold, and people coming home to spend time with family and friends.
The Ferris wheel is up on the City Hall apron next to the tree, and I’m hoping that this is finally the year that my husband, SUN sports columnist Chris Murray, and I can finally recreate our engagement photo in front of the merry-go-round in the City Hall courtyard.
But I’m hearing that the Parker administration has decided that some of the Christmas traditions that City residents have come to expect either have or are going to go bye-bye this holiday season.
The Philadelphia Christmas Parade was scheduled for Monday night at 6 p.m. according to the Google search I did looking for it. But it was canceled. Why is anyone’s guess. It had sponsorship and such, so I’m pretty sure it wasn’t cost.
But the biggest tradition that I hear is going by the wayside is the city’s annual Kwanzaa celebration. Each year, the city partners with the Kwanzaa Collective to put on the event, but what I’m hearing from my sources is that the Parker administration doesn’t want to do it this year.
While the Kwanzaa lights will continue to shine from Boathouse Row on the first day of the holiday celebrating African heritage, it appears the celebration will not.
Now, I get it. Every mayor wants to do things differently when it comes to City celebrations. One of the things that Mayor Michael Nutter did better than most of the city’s mayors is big events like Welcome America. The Welcome America show, programmed by The Roots, was a must-see event during the eight years Nutter was Mayor.
One of the first things Jim Kenney did when he became mayor was fire The Roots, something that led to us having the annual “Why do you keep putting on acts that were popular when I was 5 on the Parkway?” discussion every year.
(Seriously. Every time Kenney saw me, he’d talk to me about the Welcome America concert. It was pretty funny, actually.)
But when you’re the first Black female mayor, and you won with an overwhelming amount of the Black vote, you might want to get this whole Kwanzaa thing straightened out. Just saying.
Next week, Council is supposed to have its final session before the holidays. Somehow, I doubt that.
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