When my oldest son was five or so, he came home from pre-K wanting to know when we would be getting our kinara out to celebrate Kwanzaa.

"Son," I said, "we don't celebrate Kwanzaa."

"Why not?" he asked.

I expected to have to explain a lot of things to my kids about race in America - white privilege, slavery, discrimination. It never once occurred to me that I was going to have to explain Kwanzaa.

"Okay, so you know how we don't have a menorah at Christmas time?" I asked him.

"Uh, Mom, what's a menorah?"

"It looks like a kinara, it's got candles in it." Great, I thought, now he's going to think Kwanzaa is a religious holiday. "My point is that Kwanzaa is a special holiday for Black people to celebrate their African heritage."

"So it's an African holiday?"

"No. It's based on ideas and traditions from different parts of Africa, for African-Americans who might not know which part of Africa their ancestors came from or were taken from -"

"So it's for black people," he announced, losing interest.

D'oh! D'oh! Consciousness-raising failure! Danger, Will Robinson!

Thus was born my obsession with the proper relationship between white people and Kwanzaa.

First of all, I figured I'd better learn something about Kwanzaa. From what I read on the History Channel website and The Official Kwanzaa Web Site, it sounded like a great idea.

It's a seven-day festival first celebrated by California State University Professor Maulana Karenga in 1966. He modeled it on traditional Ashanti and Zulu harvest celebrations, with each day devoted to the core principles of unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, and faith. Kwanzaa is celebrated December 26 - January 1 every year.

As to my question, Professor Karenga says on his website that people of non-African descent should feel welcome to participate in Kwanzaa celebrations. He implies that they shouldn't necessarily be leading public Kwanzaa rituals.

(I will submit a formal request to SCAN for reconsideration of that position on the day when my google searches turn up more than one African-American Grand Marshal of a St. Patrick's Day parade.)

My oldest son is now 14. Over the years, my efforts to educate my kids about racial fault lines in this county have centered mostly around Black History Month.

Now I'm thinking of shifting to Kwanzaa. I barely manage to light the candles on my Advent wreath, so I don't see a kinara in my family's future.

But the Seven Principles are great points of departure for discussions of our country's diversity — and the economic disparities and prejudices that still divide us as a nation.