Excerpts from

Six Ways To Celebrate Christmas! & Celebrate You!

by Lynn Jericho


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If you want more than a merry Christmas, if you also want a meaningful Christmas, you will find Six Ways To Celebrate Christmas!& Celebrate You! an inspiring book. It's about the meaning of Christmas, and about the ways your soul renews its own meaning at Christmas time.

Celebrate comes from a Latin word for honoring. How do you honor Christmas? Why do you honor Christmas? More importantly, how do you honor yourself at Christmas?

1. Nature and the cycle of the Sun as reflected in the cycle of our souls
2. Nativity and the (re)birth of the Divine within our souls
3. Riches and the sensuous delights of material existence
4. Relationships and the presence of family, friends and community
5. Childhood and the powerful impact of memories on our present reality
6. Selfhood and the emerging and evolving sense of self

Celebrate Christmas! & Celebrate You! helps 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. Christmas is the time of year when both spirit and matter, the heavenly and the earthly, come together to awaken a greater clarity in your sense of self, sense of others, sense of the planet, sense of the divine and sense of the future.

Six Ways To Celebrate Christmas! & Celebrate You! asks you to think and to contemplate on the many ways you find inner benefit, clarity and meaning during Christmas. The book raises questions and offers guidance for your own Christmas experience and celebration.

Here are brief excerpts from the chapters on the six Christmases your soul experiences.

Reaching into this primeval Christmas and its meaning to the soul experience of early human consciousness, reveals a clarifying foundation to our mysterious need for all Christmases. It is Christmas as a turning point from fear and doubt to hope and confidence. The Sun that has been decreasing, losing the battle with darkness, begins to increase. With the increase comes the rebirth of Nature, the source and harmonizer of all life. Nature's Christmas tells us life is cyclical.

The Child sleeps calmly, protected by angels, and revered by simple shepherds and wise kings alike. Could we imagine ourselves so protected and revered? We all need this respite from the harsh world of ordinary existence. Our hearts find such comfort with this nativity scene. We want to believe, if only for a few minutes in the year, that innocence heals suffering, that hope redeems despair, and that death is overcome by eternal life - all because a child is born.

Both the Shepherds and the Kings are willing to travel. Is your soul willing to travel? Where, in the vast realms of your soul, is your destination? Do you seek a manger in your own soul? Is there something born in your soul during Christmas that you long to revere? Listen to your inner angelic hosts - they are in the place of your soul where you guard your sheep. Find your star shining in the dark night of your soul life.

The Christmas of Riches is the yearly personal and public festival that allows the modern individual to flood his senses, and his soul, with material satisfactions. We create magical environments, make dreams come true and feel and extend extraordinary kindness and generosity towards all others, including strangers.

With its roots in the transformative rites of nature and religion and its focus on the senses and the material, the Christmas of Riches provides an irresistible gift to our lives. At Christmastime we find an extravagant explosion of beauty and pleasure. In the deep darkness of the year our surroundings burst with colorful fantasy, altering our sense of daily reality and rescuing us from the ordinary and the routine. Feasts, parties, and gifts warm our social interaction, create a loving sparkle in our eyes and add a gentle ring to our voices.

The Christmas of Riches is the Christmas we see, taste, smell and hear. It is a festival of earthly delights and pleasures. We celebrate what we can possess and enjoy with our senses.

...Some individuals find the Christmas of Riches too rich for digestion - their emotional, sensual, or spiritual digestion. Through digestion we take what exists outside of us and we make it our own being of body, soul and spirit. If you find the Christmas of Riches too much, you can evaluate and edit your traditions (see the appendix). Remake the Christmas of Riches into the Christmas of "Enrichment." Enrich your body. Enrich your soul. Enrich your spirit.

Christmas celebrates our relationships. It is the yearly "hug," - the time we embrace, physically or metaphorically, all those we are connected with through blood, affection, history, proximity or work. The Christmas of Relationships reconnects us through thoughts, calls, card, letters, and visits. We surround all our relationships with a huge imaginary Christmas wreath of love.

"Merry Christmas" we call out to others, feeling our own hearts warm. Relationships make Christmas merry - even if the relationship is the fleeting exchange of the 2-word seasonal greeting between strangers. We wish each other a "Merry Christmas!" and, living in that wish is the hope that all your relationships will surround you, and others, with joy and peace.

... Most of us would love to find the Christmas of Relationships bringing peace to our families. However, Christmas brings out the best and the worst in families. Christmas with your family can be a very tough and painful time. We all long for, and have a right to, a loving, recognizing and supporting family, especially at Christmas. Not all of us have this familial bliss. Expectations and guilt, anticipation and disappointment, hope and endurance can run high during the Christmas of Relationships.

What can you do to bring peace to your family at Christmas?

The Christmas of Childhood is the Christmas of vague and powerful memories that provide the emotional ground for all future Christmases. These memories are shaped during our first few Christmases. The Christmas of Childhood is personal. No one but you can reveal its particular meaning, not even those who shaped your early celebrations of Nature, Nativity, Riches and Relationships. Only you have had the experience.

I must warn you: This chapter includes spoilers: it reveals a Christmas of Childhood that is far from a "Babes in Toyland" storybook. Most of us who are parents work hard to give our own children a storybook Christmas. Are we trying to give our children a Christmas we never had? Do we ever think about how this projected "storybook" Christmas impacts an innocent, unfolding soul? What would the ideal Christmas awakening be for a growing child? How would we gently bring the experience of Christmas to a little one? How would we bring them into nature? Would we tell stories and sing songs about the dark silence of the longest night? How would we tell a child about the Nativity - of a being of innocence, purity and compassion who would change the world and our souls?

... Growing older, even being four or five, changes our view of Christmas. Christmas shadows begin to appear. We have begun to want and not want. We begin to sense that Christmas magic doesn't happen magically. We start to see all the work it takes to create even the simplest aspects of the Christmas of Childhood. We also become more consciously sensitive to the dynamics of family life stressed by the demands of this holiday. The early "older" Christmases are when the bright, colorful and wonderful Child's Christmas begins to cast dark shadows. These shadows shape our adult Christmas nightmares, and we try to avoid them in all our future Christmases. We want to create the perfect family Christmas. What is your dream of a perfect Christmas?

The celebrations of Christmas have moved from the vast world of nature to the intimate world of your home, from your relationship to the birth of the Divine Child to your profoundly human relationships with others, and finally from your dreams of your childhood to your dreams of your selfhood. The final Christmas to contemplate is the Christmas of Selfhood. This Christmas is just dawning in your consciousness. Beginning with a longing - a soft inner cry for something beyond the other five Christmases - the Christmas of Selfhood is rising in your soul like the sun on a misty Christmas morning.