For about ten years, our family had a Winnie-the-Pooh calendar every year – not a Disney Winnie-the-Pooh calendar, mind you, but a Winnie-the-Pooh calendar featuring Pooh and friends the way Shepard drew them for the original Milne volumes. We are traditionalists when it comes to Pooh Bear. When Disney started producing the Winnie-the-Pooh calendar with the new, more cartoon-like representations of the Pooh cast, we stopped buying the calendars. It just wasn’t the same.
The calendar was a family favorite. Each month featured an excerpt from The House at Pooh Corner or a poem from one of A.A. Milne’s children’s poetry collections and we would read them over and over, trying to commit them to memory before the month ended. Even at an early age Emma proved herself a master at memorizing these verses and they became one of her collections – a collection of Winnie-the-Pooh poems and stories that she could recite by heart. The Pooh characters became like treasured friends and she talked about them constantly.
There was something about the life and times of the Winnie-the-Pooh characters that just seemed to fit Emma’s temperament and personality. Emma always had a way of talking that was not only mature for her age, but also seemed to be of another era and place. Even as a toddler, she took in and commented on the world around her in a rhythmic, poetic way that would have fit right in if she were spending her days in the Hundred Acre Woods. I can easily imagine A.A. Milne writing little Emma into his stories and poems, a precocious and articulate new sidekick for Christopher Robin and his silly old bear.
I was flipping through our old calendars (I had saved them all) and saw some verses that remind me of Emma and some Emma stories. For my next post, that’s where I’m headed.
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