We are celebrating Christmas Ukrainian-style this year. My selections for December from the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection are all creations of young Ukrainian Greek Catholic icon-makers from Lviv, a city close to the nation's western border with Poland. Their church, formed on the boundary between the Latin West and the Byzantine East, acknowledges the Pope in Rome but worships in the Eastern Orthodox way, including the veneration of icons. In Orthodox depictions of the Nativity, the Virgin Mary is usually shown reclining on the ground after giving birth to the Christ Child, a reminder that God came down to earth from heaven in the form of a baby boy at the first Christmas. Arsen Bereza likes to work with found materials, and the rusted metal base of his Nativity scene underscores the barren and broken world into which this new life has come. Ulyana Tomkevych shows Mary and the Baby Jesus (above left) amid the bleak midwinter, stretched out on a miraculous bed of flowers inspired by Ukrainian embroidery patterns. While the Virgin rests cheek to cheek with the Christ Child in an icon by Sviatoslav Vladyka, recalling traditional imagery of the Virgin of Tenderness, a pensive Joseph cannot seem to make up his mind whether to pick up and play the bandura, a stringed Ukrainian folk instrument lying at his feet. Kateryna Kuziv gives her Nativity icon an added theological meaning by depicting the manger where the Baby Jesus sleeps as a stylized altar, bringing to mind his future sacrificial death reenacted in the Eucharist. In addition to this quartet of Ukrainian Greek Catholic icons now on view in the Away in a Manger page in The Coming of Christ gallery in The Life of Christ section, a fifth icon by Natalya Rusetska is the subject of a meditation on the cosmic dimension of the Birth of Christ in the Art Reflections gallery of the Moments with Masters section. My best wishes to you all from a peace-filled Christmas and a hopeful New Year! (John Kohan)