Fascinating Authors

Book Review
By
John H. Manhold

Celebrate Christmas & Celebrate You, ISBN: 0972331263 An Inner Christmas Book, Paperback, 144 pages, by Lynn Jericho.

This small volume is a call for readers to examine themselves introspectively “to awaken and exercise your soul to what it honors and celebrates at Christmas”. The author, in making her own search, found six distinct Christmas celebrations where she honored particular relationships in her life. She provides a discussion of these individual celebrations “to help you find the ways your soul, your personal humanity, finds more inner depth, inner height and inner breadth in and through the six experiences of Christmas”.

In approaching her subject Ms. Jericho begins with some defining words and discussion about sentimentality and cynicism, levels of consciousness, Christmas questions and reactions, and Christmas and your soul, in “the three contexts of Christmas”, which she defines as  cosmic, social and personal.

From this introductory material, the discussion proceeds through the six Christmases she had discovered, providing a chapter devoted to each. The Christmas of Nature celebrates the harmonies of the natural world. The Christmas of Nativity celebrates “the Birth of the Divine within our souls”. These are followed by an examination of Christmases of Riches, Relationships, Childhood and “Selfhood”. Each chapter admonishes the reader to ask continuously questions of themselves, and to analyze their thoughts and the primary and secondary meanings they discover in their thought patterns.

The chapter on Riches, for example, asks that the thoughts brought to mind by the colors of the season, by each decoration – trees, wreaths, lights, and other ornaments – and even thoughts about the food of Christmas, be examined “at every step”. And one should ask if they have enough interest, imagination, money, time and energy to follow through on their first thoughts of preparation for the season?

The chapter on the Christmas of Relationships brings forth an examination of family and other relationships at this particular time of year and of the many factors that may be influential.

The Chapter on The Christmas of Childhood examines the roots of an individual’s expectations and subsequent reactions, and provides some interesting thoughts about how the child’s desires may not be compatible with the Christmas the adult may have in mind to provide.

In Celebrate Christmas & Celebrate You, Lynn Jericho has provided a ‘different’ type of book for, and about, Christmas. It is a book that will provide much to think about when celebrating this time of year that provides so much joy, and yet so much  melancholia, for so many people.