Customer Reviews

Celebrations around the World: A Multicultural Handbook

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CELEBRATIONS AROUND THE WORLD contains a wealth of information and activities for students based on multicultural holidays. I recently purchased this book to use with my English Language Development (ESL) classes who are corresponding with other students all over the world via e-mail.

In general, I thought that this was a wonderful resource. I am a little bit concerned about a couple of things. On July 25, the author lists St. Christopher Day as a Catholic celebration. She does mention that because not much can be proved about the existence of Christopher, he was removed from the canon. True... then why did she include this in the book? As far as I know and as far as I can determine, this is not a day that is even celebrated in spite of the canon. The actual feast day of July 25 is St. James day. I also wondered why the author listed St. Christopher Day as specifically a Catholic celebration but other Catholic observances/celebrations she listed as Christian. The feast of The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary on August 15 is listed as a Christian observance as is Corpus Christi. True, both are Christian celebrations, but if you are being specific in other places in the book I'd think that with these two in particular, you'd want to specify Catholic. I noticed that in the list of books consulted in the back of the book, the author lists many general works about holidays and celebrations. She also lists specific works about Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism. She apparantly did not consult a book of Saints or a book of the Christian Calendar. It appears that she relied on the general works for this information. I wonder why. As I said, this book is generally very good and presents quite a bit of information. But the fuzzy information and presentation regarding the Christian and Catholic days left me wondering about the rest of it.