Watch Night type celebrations do seem to be hit and miss these days. I know of only one church in the Twin Cities that has the service anymore, though there could of course be others I'm not aware of. That service tries to tie the Watch Night thing in with Kwanzaa, in a bizarrely charismatic megachurch sort of way, according to an African American friend of mine who went to one of their services a couple years ago out of curiousity. Is that something new? Most of the black folks I know are either Baptist or non-religious, and don't celebrate Kwanzaa or Watch Night, despite there being a very large Juneteenth celebration in our community.

I don't know that many black Pentecostals, as around my part of the woods, there aren't very many of them, and they tend to remain more self-segregated than the black Baptists do. The African Americans I am closest to aren't religious at all, but I know a lot of African American families as acquaintances who are church folk. But like I said, they are mostly Baptist.

But it is odd that this get mentioned here, as I just had this conversation with my former neighbor last week, who I mention above. The church that celebrates Watch Night is just down the street from her & our old house, and is an African American Pentecostal church. Not one of those evangelical/fundamentalist sorts of black megachurches, because it is a very tiny church building. But it does seem to be trying to modernize and reinvent itself along that politically conservative, fundie evangelical line so many black churches are following these days in their effort to keep up with the white fundamentalist megachurch phenomenon.

Life just keeps getting odder, the older I get.