Half the Hundred-Acre Gang Gathers for Christmas With Pooh

When we put out our Christmas decorations later this month, Winnie-the-Pooh will be popping up all over our living room. I can't help but love the tubby little cubby, and over the past ten or fifteen years, he has exploded in popularity so that new tie-in products are constantly arriving. I have enough Pooh ornaments to fill my own Christmas tree, to say nothing of the wall decorations, plush figures and various other Pooh-related items. Among those assorted other items are books, of which I have several dozen. One that I just came across is Christmas With Pooh, a teensy weensy shaped board book written by Frank Berrios and illustrated by the Disney Storybook artists.

It's the artists who have the lion's share of the work here, since most pages feature only one or two short sentences. There is rhyme in this book, but it's not very well done; most times there is no metric consistency among the lines, which doesn't make for a very smooth read. Berrios had so little to do here, it's a shame he didn't expend a bit of extra effort to make the rhyme work better. It's not as though the book really has any sort of plot; it's just a series of snapshots from the Hundred-Acre Wood Christmas celebration, and there aren't very many of them since the book is only 16 pages long.

The pictures, starting with the cover, which features Pooh in a Santa hat against a bright green background, are lively and richly colored. Only half of the woodland residents seem to be in on the festivities, which include decorating a scrawny Charlie Brown-ish tree, watching the snow fall, singing Christmas carols and exchanging gifts.

Pooh, Piglet, Tigger, Eeyore and Roo are present, but there's no sign of Kanga, Gopher, Owl, Christopher Robin or, most surprisingly, Rabbit. I would've expected to see him before Roo, but maybe he's in one of his cranky moods and not inclined to participate in his friends' frivolities. At any rate, I don't mind that it focuses on only a few characters. Since this is aimed at very young pre-readers, it's easier to stick with five, and anyway, ten characters couldn't really fit on one of those tiny two-page spreads. Not that they all would need to be shown together, but since the book is concentrating on the friends' comradeship, it makes sense to show the ensemble as much as possible.

Christmas With Pooh is the perfect fit for a two-year-old's stocking, and those little hands will find it easy to grasp the thick pages. The book itself is sturdy even if the story is a little flimsy, and the eye-catching pictures of Pooh and pals make this a tiny yuletide delight.