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"Holidays are communiques or bulletins about a people's sacred past," Mayes writes, "and what work ought to be done about a community's present condition and its future." Kwanzaa serves as a kind of case study in the meanings of culturally constructed holidays. Inspired in part by black American holidays that predated it, Kwanzaa has since inspired its own imitators seeking a place on the black cultural calendar. Mayes (Univ. of Minnesota, Twin Cities) discusses Kwanzaa's "early beginnings, its internal promotion, and its external appropriation." Created in the mid-1960s as a holiday deriving from the cultural aesthetic associated with black power, Kwanzaa soon became incorporated into a broader commercialization of cultural holidays, to the disappointment and scolding of some of Kwanzaa's early proponents. The holiday thus emerged as part of a "black protest calendar," a case study in how "African-Americans used the calendar to perennialize their struggle and annually politicize themselves into existence," but eventually became an ethnic American holiday tagged with consumer icons. A thorough study, for advanced students and scholars. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. P. Harvey University of Colorado at Colorado Springs