- [Narrator] Coming up on "One Detroit."

Members of In the Tradition Jazz Ensemble talk about their unique musical style and Kwanzaa performances.

Plus, a conversation with religious leaders about coping with depression and grief during the holidays.

Also ahead, we'll take a trip down memory lane with the Hudson's Holidays exhibit at the Detroit Historical Museum.

Plus, we'll have some ideas on how to spend this weekend before Christmas.

And we'll wrap up with holiday messages from the "One Detroit" team.

It's all coming up next on "One Detroit."

- [Announcer] From Delta Faucets to Behr Paint, Masco Corporation is proud to deliver products that enhance the way consumers all over the world experience and enjoy their living spaces.

Masco, serving Michigan communities since 1929.

Support for this program is provided by, the Cynthia and Edsel Ford Fund for Journalism at Detroit Public TV.

- [Announcer] The DTE Foundation is a proud sponsor of Detroit Public TV.

Among the state's largest foundations committed to Michigan-focused giving.

We support organizations that are doing exceptional work in our state.

Visit dtefoundation.com to learn more.

- [Announcer] Nissan Foundation, and viewers like you.

(bright music) - [Narrator] Just ahead on this week's "One Detroit."

We'll examine the vital role of the church to provide hope for those who are hurting this holiday season.

Plus, we'll see what made holidays at the former Hudson's department store in downtown Detroit so magical.

Also coming up, Dave Wagner and Peter Whorf of 90.9 WRCJ offer up some events to enjoy this holiday weekend and beyond.

And members of the "One Detroit" team share special greetings.

But first up, a Detroit jazz ensemble called In The Tradition is preparing to celebrate the African American holiday of Kwanzaa with two special performances on December 30th.

The band has been around for 30 years and specializes in Africa centric music.

One Detroit contributor Sarah Zientarski caught up with the ensemble during a rehearsal at the Shrine of the Black Madonna.

(gentle music) (upbeat music) - More than being a band, we're a family.

There's that spiritual link with us when we take to that stage.

It's automatically apparent when you hear the music that you're hearing a family connection.

(upbeat music) In the Tradition started back in 1993 and it started as a jazz quintet.

And we didn't wanna mimic other ensembles, so we decided to take different aspects of the African diasporic language and apply it to what we were doing.

And that's how we came up with the approach and that's why we call it the traditional approach, In the Tradition.

We're currently at nine pieces right now, including our vocalists and percussionists.

We have four horns, a rhythm section of piano, bass, drums, djembe and the vocalist doubles on percussion as well.

- I have been a member of In the Tradition somewhere around 20 years.

I lost count after a while.

- The musicianship level is very high in our band.

And spiritually, everyone is basically on the same plane.

And we come together because there's a genuine love and affection for each other, and it's a love and affection for the music that we create.

- I'm particularly attracted to In the Tradition because along with playing jazz music, it has a political and African cultural twists.

And a lot of the music and arrangements we do are syncopated in a very African style to provide an African rhythmic feel.

So that's how we come to decide or to call this African jazz.

All of our original compositions have themes and motifs that speak to African and African-American history.

(gentle music) - We're always excited when we take the stage, but during the Kwanzaa season, it's very special for us.

We love being inside the community and being a part of it and sharing our musical gift with the rest of the community.

Kwanzaa in the African American community is a reaffirmation of principles that we practice before the slave experience, and it's a sense of re-energizing the community and reinstiling those principles that we lost so long ago.

- Kwanzaa was created in 1966 under the direction of Dr. Maulana Karenga who's a professor of African American studies, along with other members of an organization he directs called Us.

- On December the 30th, we're doing two performances.

One at the Charles Wright Museum of African American History from one to three in the afternoon.

And at eight o'clock, we'll be appearing at Aretha's Jazz Cafe in the music hall.

Our performances there tend to get very energetic and the audiences there are highly responsive, and we're just grateful to be in there.

It's a very intimate atmosphere for us and it allows the music to flow very freely.

And we can interact with the audience very well there.

(gentle music) - And we have several selections that correspond with the seven principles of Kwanzaa, which is seven principles that collectively comprise a value system.

So we've selected songs to align with each one of these principles, and the idea will be to convey the message of Kwanzaa in terms of American people coming together to celebrate our history and culture and the need for us to continue to advance our culture.

- They tend to be upbeat, they tend to be driving in rhythm and propulsion, and we think that that tends to bring the music alive.

You're not just hearing a perfunctory performance.

Each principle has a driving beat behind it, and we use that to drive the message home.

- A major part of Kwanzaa, objective of Kwanzaa is to teach people about the value system, about the holiday so that they can learn how it's done and they can then take it and embrace it as their very own and celebrate it in successive years or successive days for the remainder of the celebration.

If you've never been to Kwanzaa or Kwanzaa program a celebration, come out so you can learn more about the celebration, about the history and culture of African Americans.

And if you like music, particularly if you like jazz, if you come and join us, you will not be disappointed.

I think you will find it very enlightening, educational, and spiritually uplifting.

And I will stand here to say, or sit here and say, I guarantee that you won't be disappointed.

- I hope when people come to see the performance, they take away a sense of community and a sense of joy and pride.

(upbeat music) (crowd cheering) - [Narrator] Although the holiday season is a joyful occasion for many people, this time of the year can also trigger depression and stress for others, such as families struggling with their finances or grieving the loss of a loved one.

As part of American Black Journal's Black Church in Detroit initiative, host Steven Henderson spoke with three religious leaders about how the church provides support to those in need during the holidays.

(gentle music) - The last three months of the year really are my favorites.

I am always in such a great mood and there are so many kind of high points in those three months, including my birthday, which is usually the week of Thanksgiving, that I often don't think about all of the sort of flip side of that, and maybe the hardship that some people are enduring either because of money or because of of loss.

So I just wanna start off with us just talking about how prominent that is, how much of that you see in your work.

Reverend Presley, I'll start with you.

- Oh, well, very much so.

You know, I always say that Frankie Beverly Maze tapped into their theological spirit with that song "Joy and pain, sunshine and rain," because often it is that close for so many families in this season, while it's so much joy and being able to gather together, for many, there'll be empty seats at the table, which will really cause, you know, a continuation of them navigating grief for their lost loved ones.

And so we take it as very important in this season to make sure that we create spaces and resources for our congregation community.

- The church was always that space.

And I mean, generations who had it way worse than us or didn't have air conditioned, didn't have praise teams, didn't have all the fancy stuff that we have, but they had the church.

And it was a place that they could come and be prayed over, hands could be laid upon them.

And so now we're at another stage.

And so we are embracing behavioral health and making room for development center to come in and to do sessions and to teach people about anxiety and about depression, those type of things.

And then empowering them to really acknowledge that we going through, not just the spiritual going through, okay, alright, but we're hearing voices or we're struggling with depression, or whatever, and that this is a safe place, right?

The body of Christ, the church is a place where you can come where we're setting a culture or an atmosphere where you can come.

- Dr. Lockett, your work is not in the church, but it is of the church and it's inspired by the church.

Talk about the things that you see in your work environment that cry out for attention this time of the year.

- Absolutely.

So as a director of Spiritual Care and Community Affairs for Detroit Medical Center, you know, we see death and life simultaneously every single day.

You know, with a new mother coming in with the expectation of delivering a full-term baby only to find out that that baby is very unlikely to survive.

And being able to have that conversation with that mother and with that father, letting them know that unfortunately, you're in this situation.

And you still have to give birth to this unborn child that would no longer be living.

So that's a whole different type of grief.

And then when you go down the, path of the elderly community, you know, who we expect to get to end of life when they're 80 and 90 and maybe even a hundred years of age that have come to that space.

But now, as you said before, we are seeing so many people who are in that space of the 45 to 55-year-old individuals who have not been listening to their bodies.

I was having a conversation with someone the other day that you have to be in touch with your tempo because when you don't listen to your tempo, guess what?

Your tempo will do whatever it wants to do, and sometimes that tempo will allow you to be taken out.

So we have to really pay attention to that.

- We're talking about the holidays, and that's a particularly tough time for folks.

But the church always is called to this space and because of the things that we experience as African Americans, not just in Detroit, but all over the country, the need is always, the need is always there, and so the demand on the church is always kind of at a high level.

- Very much so.

and I'm blessed here at Third New Hope because we have a significant amount of licensed counselors and therapists who are also members of our congregation.

And as a result, we started a ministry called Seasons of Grace, which provides people an opportunity to access these counselors in order to process the grief that they're experiencing.

And so we situated the month of October as our mental health awareness month, and we even had settings for our youth and children to be able to process as well because along the lines of the items of loss that Dr. Lockett mentioned, divorce, family separations are things that children are having to encounter, particularly in this holiday season, that we wanna make sure that we're providing them the resource to think through and to find healthy ways to navigate the challenges in which they're experiencing.

- [Narrator] Turning now to a holiday tradition that delighted Detroiters for many years.

Longtime residents will remember the decorations and displays at the iconic downtown Hudson's department store.

The Detroit Historical Museum is helping visitors relive that shopping experience through a Hudson's holidays exhibit.

The nostalgic display includes the popular toys, decorations, and artifacts that made a trip to the store at Christmas time so special.

(gentle music) (bright music) - When I think of the holidays, I think of Hudson's.

Growing up in Detroit, one of my first memories of the holidays was getting all dressed up and going downtown to Hudson's to visit Santa.

- I became enthralled with the store and the traditions the first time my folks brought me downtown to the store.

And I'd never seen a store that big and I just went nuts.

- [Delisha] Nobody did it quite like Hudson's did it.

From the big tree to all the beautiful things to buy.

I mean, it really was a place of wonder.

- [Michael] The show began on the sidewalk.

The minute you came inside, you were literally thrown into a different world with beautiful architecture and lighting and drapes and things like that.

You forgot all your troubles.

- We're sitting here today in the main area of our Hudson's holiday exhibit in the Detroit Historical Museum.

The holidays are a time when you wanna share stories with your family.

You want your kids to experience the things that you experienced when you were a kid.

And one of the things that we hear about here at the Detroit Historical Society most often is Hudson's.

- The company meant so much to so many people in this marketplace.

That store, you know, during holidays, employed 10,000 people.

100,000 people a day would visit that building to not only shop but dine.

The company through the years created so many of our iconic events.

The Thanksgiving Day Parade was begun by the company in 1924.

- Hudson's was a huge department store.

And it had restaurants, it had Santa, and it was kind of the special place that you went, particularly at the holiday season.

Here at the museum, we wanted people to have the idea and the feeling of what that might've been like years ago when our Grand Department store Hudson's was in its heyday.

- What we did is we edited down a lot of things.

What would be the most relevant for the greater public?

- There's a surprise and a delight to take you back to that Hudson's holiday experience.

And I love that about how we've set it up here.

It's not just one place, but it really is a vibe, if you will.

- This exhibition was designed in much the same way that a department store was, is exactly what our exhibits team was thinking about when they put this thing together.

We've created 11 popups all through the museum space.

When I was first touring this as it was kind of being put up, I realized, you know, as you walk down the stairs, right at the bottom of the stairs is some signage and advertising from Hudson's back in their basement shops, which were kind of their bargain.

That's where you got the term bargain basement, right?

One of the things that I love is that we actually created a little mini pop-up exhibit inside of the elevator.

And so it's really fun that we've been able to recreate that experience of going from floor to floor and experiencing this big department store by putting those departments in different places all throughout the museum.

- The Santa Bears are my favorite part of this exhibition.

I think the first Santa Bear came out in 1985.

I remember that one.

I definitely remember the 1986 bear because he had the the little 1986 on the the sweater.

But we always got Santa Bears for Christmas.

Every year, the Santa Bears were part of our Christmas tradition.

- My favorite part of the museum, you know, I am...

I kind of really love holiday sparkles, so I do love all of the Christmas lights and the sparkly stuff here in Toyland, which is where we're sitting.

I also really love the fashion.

Our fashion collection here at the society is amazing.

- [Michael] In terms of what the public will be interested in, certainly, Santa Bears.

It has created a huge interest just from the social media thus far.

The delivery wagon, that was created for the 75th anniversary of the company.

Shopping bags, you know, that we hadn't previously displayed through the years.

Photographs that we blew up.

Things that were donated from the public.

The red carpet that you see here as you come into the Toyland area.

- It's interesting when you think about kids now having the experience of, you know, shopping purely online, like, they don't even get the big Christmas catalog, much less the experience of going to a really beautiful department store or even a mall.

And so bringing an exhibit back like this one where it is all decorated and everything is sparkly and beautiful and you get to remember that and feel really special for a minute, gives the kids the opportunity to experience something that they're not experiencing in real life anymore.

This museum is a place where we want families to come together and come and visit us during the holidays.

We brought this really nostalgic exhibition to the public for that reason.

- It's about life and family and the opportunity to be together, which, you know, these days is certainly not something to be taken for granted.

So I really do think that it really is an inclusive exhibition that people can come and just really, you know, remember a simpler time and be amazed by these toys.

- I think whenever you have the experience of being put back into a specific time, you have this moment where you get to imagine what it was to be there at that time, what those people's lives were like.

- [Delisha] I really hope that people come and enjoy it and feel really good when they're here.

- [Michael] I hope they take away, you know, feeling of joy.

- This exhibit is going to remind you once again, what it means to share memories with your family.

It's kind of the perfect entry to that holiday season for everybody, - [Narrator] And you have until January 2nd to check out the Hudson's Holidays exhibit at the Detroit Historical Museum.

There are plenty of other activities to add to your calendar over the holidays.

Peter Whorf and Dave Wagner from 90.9 WRCJ have the rundown in today's "One Detroit Weekend."

- Happy holidays, Dave.

Wanna talk about some events happening as we head into the weekend before Christmas?

- You bet I do.

Let's start with Christmas fun for the family as Elf In Concert is hitting the stage at Orchestra Hall tomorrow and Saturday.

- [Peter] Oh, yeah, that's a great movie, and I know it's got to be incredible as a concert.

Also, Friday and Saturday is a drop-in workshop at the Detroit Institute of Art's Art-Making studio.

This workshop allows people to create Korean patchwork cloths called bojagi.

The cloths can be used to cover food, wrap gifts, or whatever else you find them useful for.

- It sounds like a really cool craft project.

Now, don't miss the award-winning Ain't Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations on stage at the Fisher Theatre through the 23rd.

There's definitely more to find out about the beloved Motown group in this musical.

- [Peter] I would love to see that.

And through December 30th, you can see the Holiday House tour and all aboard Model Railroad exhibit at the Rochester Hills Museum at Van Hoosen Farm.

- [Dave] And, of course, can't forget the holiday carriage rides ongoing every Friday and Saturday through December 31st.

There are also rides on New Year's Eve.

These charming tours are along the Woodward Esplanade.

- And there's still so much to do around Detroit.

Here are a few more.

Happy holidays, everyone.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] And finally, we want to thank you, our viewers for watching "One Detroit" this year.

Our team came together to deliver these special holiday messages.

(bright music) - [Both] Happy holidays.

- [Both] Happy holidays.

- [Group] Happy holidays.

- When I think of "One Detroit," I think of a team of people capturing the voice of the most important city in America.

- When I think of "One Detroit," I think of local trusted journalism.

- When I think of "One Detroit," I think of, well, one Detroit, the community.

- I think of "One Detroit," I think of important local stories that really capture the spirit of our community.

- When I think of "One Detroit," I think of my fellow Detroiters and learning about their lives.

- My favorite "One Detroit" stories from the year was when we had the Gen Z town hall, bringing young people in to talk about the future of work, jobs, and what they saw for their future here in Detroit.

- My favorite "One Detroit" story of the year was the MLK 60th.

It was incredibly informative.

I think we told the world that MLK did his "I Have a Dream" speech here first.

- When I think of "One Detroit," I think of unique, in-depth stories about people in our community, and these are usually stories you can't see anywhere else.

- When I think of "One Detroit," I think of long form documentary storytelling that lets us tell stories about our community in an in-dept, meaningful way.

- My favorite "One Detroit" story from this year was our coverage on Madam Butterfly.

It's really great piece put on by Detroit Opera.

It had it all Japanese and Japanese and very creative team.

We got to tell a story in a really interesting way and we got feedback from our Asian American Pacific Islander Advisory Committee members to talk about how that story really impacted them.

- When I think of "One Detroit," I think of a small team doing really big things and really great things.

- When I think of "One Detroit," I think of thoughtful in-depth coverage you won't find anywhere else.

- When I think of "One Detroit," I think of the ability to capture all of the magic that happens in Detroit and bringing it right to your home.

Thank you for allowing us to serve you.

Have a wonderful holiday.

- [Narrator] That'll do it for this week's "One Detroit."

Thanks for watching.

Head to the "One Detroit" website for all the stories we're working on.

Follow us on social media and sign up for our weekly newsletter.

- [Announcer] From Delta Faucets to Behr Paint, Masco Corporation is proud to deliver products that enhance the way consumers all over the world experience and enjoy their living spaces.

Masco, serving Michigan communities since 1929.

Support for this program is provided by the Cynthia and Edsekl Ford Fund for Journalism at Detroit Public TV.

- [Announcer] The DTE Foundation is a proud sponsor of Detroit Public TV.

Among the state's largest foundations committed to Michigan focused giving.

We support organizations that are doing exceptional work in our state.

Visit dtefoundation.com to learn more.

- [Narrator] Nissan Foundation, and viewers like you.

(gentle music) (gentle piano music)