Lara's First Christmas

Lara, along with her refugee parents, finds herself marooned in an isolated little hotel in snowbound Norway before World War II. Left all alone, she finds two eccentric old English guests who teach her to ski. And she discovers deep love and wisdom from the grandfatherly carpenter Andreas, who teaches her that Christmas really is a universal event, open to every heart and every faith.

A warm, luminous story about the real meaning of Christmas―from the author of The Beejum Book, whimsically illustrated by the artist Maggie Mailer.

Alice O. Howell was born in Cambridge, Mass., in 1922. From an early age, she lived abroad in hotels and boarding schools, never more than three months in one place. By eighteen, she had lived in or traveled to thirty-seven countries and undertaken a lifelong study of comparative religion and mythology. She graduated from the Buser Institut in Switzerland before returning with her parents to the U.S. During World War II, she studied under the astrologer Marc Edmund Jones as his youngest student. She got married, had four children, and taught English and history in private schools on Long Island for eighteen years, progressing to the university level. Howell continued to study Jungian depth psychology and astrology for thirty years. At the advice of the Jungian analyst Dr. Edward F. Edinger, she attempted to prove astrology a useful diagnostic aid in the practice of Jungian psychology and devoted her time to patients sent by psychiatrists and analysts. Howell taught at the Jung Foundation in New York City and later at the C.G. Jung institutes in Chicago and L.A. and became an international lecturer. She is the primary pioneer in linking psychology and astrology. Encouraged by her second husband, Walter Andersen, she has written seven books, including Jungian Symbolism in Astrology (1987); The Dove in the Stone (1988); and The Web in the Sea (1933); as well as three books for SteinerBooks and Lindisfarne Books: How Like an Angel Came I Down (1991); The Beejum Book (2002); Lara's First Christmas (2004); and From the Archives of the Heart (2010). Now widowed and a great-grandmother, Alice O. Howell lives in the Massachusetts Berkshires and continues her practice and moderates an online Jungian group.