"National Winnie-the-Pooh Day"

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“National Winnie-the-Pooh Day”

January 15, 2022

 

“Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now,

bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head…”

                                                                                                Winnie-the-Pooh, 1926

                                                                                                A.A. Milne (January 18, 1882- January 31,1956)

 

Wednesday will be National Winnie-the-Pooh Day. Like millions of children born after 1926, I was raised on Winnie-the-Pooh[1], along, of course, on oatmeal, goats’ milk, and spinach. So, it was not a surprise when, in the mid-‘80s, a day was set aside to celebrate Milne’s “Teddy Bear” – “A bear, however hard he tries/Grows tubby without exercise.”[2] The celebrations’ origin likely stems from Disney. The company wished to promote movies, like Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree (1966) and The Many Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh (1977). Whatever the reason, the day should be celebrated; for love of Pooh is universal.  

 

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During the war, my mother returned to her family’s home in Madison, Connecticut. My father was in the army, first in Texas and then in Italy. My grandfather was in charge of plantations for U.S. Rubber and traveled a great deal. But he loved his grandchildren; deep in the surrounding woods he would lead us to what he called Bruin’s lair, an indention under a large tree, which is where our imagined bear slept. How did we know “he” was a boar, not a sow? I don’t know. We just did. We never saw Bruin, but we knew he existed, for food we left was gone by the next day.

 

In the woods that surround Essex Meadows I have seen no pooh bears, tiggers, eeyores, roos, or heffalumps, but we do have imaginations, and this place sits on a hundred acres of woods, fields, and swamps, with trails through them, so it is possible our woods, fields, and swamps are alive with Pooh and his friends.

 

It is estimated that seventy million copies of the four Winnie-the-Pooh books have sold over the ninety-nine years since the first one appeared in 1924. And countless millions of children have seen the twenty or so movies and the many television shows that have been produced, since the first Disney movie appeared in 1966. Additionally, a dozen video games starring Winnie are on the market. 

 

Following service with the Signal Corps in World War I, A.A. Milne (Alan Alexander), who had a degree in mathematics from Cambridge, failed to get his job back at Punch. In 1913, he had married Dorothy de Sélincourt, and in 1920 his only child was born, Christopher Robin Milne. In 1924, A.A. Milne, then a poet and playwright, produced the first of the four Pooh books, When We Were Very Young – a book comprised solely of poems. In this we are introduced, in a poem titled “Teddy Bear,” to Edward Bear. In the Introduction to the first English edition of the book Milne explains that you will find some lines about a swan in the poem, “Summer Afternoons”: “I should have explained to you in the Note,” he wrote, “that Christopher Robin, who feeds this swan in the mornings, has given him the name of ‘Pooh.’” Two years later, in October 1926, Winnie-the-Pooh was published, introducing Edward Bear as Winnie-the-Pooh.

 

Christopher Robin Milne was born on August 21, 1920. At age eight, he was sent off to boarding school. While some people give October 14, 1926 as Pooh’s birthday, the day Winnie-the-Pooh was published, a better date might be August 21, 1921, Christopher Milne’s first birthday. Christopher was given a teddy bear, or at least that is what one infers from some lines in the last chapter of the final Pooh book, The House at Pooh Corner (1928): “’Pooh, promise you won’t forget me, ever. Not even when I’m a hundred.’ Pooh thought for a little. ‘How old will I be then?’ ‘Ninety-nine.’” 

 

Regardless of what date we commemorate Winnie-the-Pooh, we should celebrate remembrances of childhood, of a time unblemished by the realities of life. We should never forget our memories, of a time when days were long, and the future was only as far as tomorrow. Soon enough, we grew up; we learned what was real and what was not, or, at least, we thought we did. In the final paragraph of The House at Pooh Corner, as his son was headed off to boarding school, Milne wrote: “So they went off together. But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.”

 

And so it was for us; we abandoned childhood, not because we wanted to, but because we were growing up. Our voices changed and our bodies developed in mysterious ways. As it says in Corinthians, “… when I became a man, I put away childish things.” And now, as I grow old, memories come flocking back, of the enchanted places where I once played. My childhood will always be a part of who I am. And as it is for me, so it is for you. That they cannot take away, as Winnie-the-Pooh is here to remind us.