My Christmas book collection is becoming positively enormous. It's expanded to fill three shelves, and the books are starting to double back on themselves. Considering the quantity of Christmas books that the publishers pump out every year, you might not think that's a lot, but I don't buy Christmas books that are about recipes or crafts, which kills about 90 percent of them. I buy either books of Christmas stories, or books about Christmas customs in other countries, or in past centuries.
I also have a couple of books about the pagan antecedents of the holidays, When Santa Was a Shaman and The Winter Solstice, and am always interested in checking out more, which is why I noticed Dorothy Morrison's Yule when it was first published. It looked pretty lightweight when I paged through it and the majority of the reviews I saw were negative.
I found it at the local remainder sale for only $2.50. That's about what it's worth. I read it in a couple of hours and was pretty underwhelmed. Call it "Paganism Lite." I know that folks who practice Wicca do use little spells and incantations to connect them with the spiritual world, but the little rhymes Morrison suggests in this book read as cutsey in the extreme. I had this vision of real pagans rolling their eyes at the text.
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