Mary Baker Eddy was careful about how she wanted Christ and Christmas read, and she said so directly. The eleven images she and James Gilman produced together were not meant, in her words, to refer to her own personality. They were meant to foretell, as she put it, the typical appearing of the womanhood as well as the manhood of God, our divine Father and Mother.
That sentence is doing real theological work. Christian Science holds that God is understood as both Father and Mother, not exclusively as a masculine figure in the way most of the Christian tradition around Eddy had long pictured the divine. Christ and Christmas puts that claim into images rather than only into prose, illustrating a poem with pictures Eddy directed specifically to embody a teaching about God's nature, not merely to decorate a Christmas verse.
Eddy went further still, describing the connection between the book's art and her own core teaching as more than a loose analogy. The art of Christian Science, she wrote, came through inspiration the same way its Science had. For Eddy, an illustrated poem and a doctrinal textbook were not different categories of work answering to different standards. Both, in her account, arrived by the same means, which is why she treated the pictures as carrying real doctrinal weight rather than standing outside her teaching as mere ornament.