Winnie the Pooh Day
by Sandra Merville Hart
Of all the characters in children’s books I’ve read, Alan Alexander Milne’s Winnie the Pooh may be my favorite. This character was based on the author’s son’s teddy bear. In fact, the boy’s collection also included a tiger, a donkey, a piglet, and two kangaroos. Christopher Robin, his son, is the boy in the stories. Owl and Rabbit lived only in Milne’s imagination … and now in ours.
Even the story’s setting is real—the Hundred Acre Wood is patterned after the Ashdown Forest near Milne’s East Sussex home. Milne walked through the woods with Christopher. E.H. Shepard, the books’ illustrator, used the Ashdown Forest as inspiration for his drawings.
Readers sense the love and wisdom within the pages of Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner from a “Bear of Very Little Brain.” Christopher Robin is a sweet, compassionate boy with unending patience for the scrapes in which his best friend Winnie the Pooh finds himself.
Poor Eeyore is always gloomy yet lovable. Piglet is often afraid. Roo is always ready to play. Tigger is full of enthusiasm that grates on Rabbit’s nerves. All of them rely on the wisdom of Owl, who is perhaps not as wise as he thinks.
Milne created a lovable cast of everyday characters that live on today. Though he wrote humorous stories, plays, screenplays, poems, and a detective novel, it is his stories for children that have endured.
Yet Milne stopped writing children’s stories. His son had been an inspiration for them and he was growing older. The fame of the real Christopher Robin appalled his father. It was far more publicity than he desired for his young son.
A.A. Milne’s amazingly successful Winnie the Pooh made it difficult to write in other genres. He simply wanted to write whatever he wanted. That door closed.
Upon his death, the family received rights to his Pooh books as well as the Westminster School, the Royal Literary Fund, and the Garrick Club. Over the years, the beneficiaries eventually sold their interest to Disney Corporation.
The Hollywood Walk of Fame gave a star to Winnie the Pooh in 2006, an honor that Milne likely never imagined.
January 18th is known as Winnie the Pooh Day as a celebration of A.A. Milne’s birthday on that day in 1882.
Sources
“A.A. Milne,” Wikipedia, 2020/12/14, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._A._Milne.
“A.A. Milne: 5 Facts About ‘Winnie-the-Pooh’ Author,” Biography, 2020/12/14 https://www.biography.com/news/winnie-the-pooh-author-biography-facts.
“Winnie the Pooh,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2020/12/14 https://www.britannica.com/topic/Winnie-the-Pooh-childrens-stories-by-Milne.
