Winnie the Pooh, Tigger, Piglet and Eeyore Sing "O Christmas Tree!"

One of my favorite post-Christmas guilty pleasures is raiding Hallmark stores for ornaments that are now 50 or, if I’m really lucky, 75 percent off. Usually by the time the price is that low, all of the stuff I’m really interested in is gone. But at 50 percent, I generally still have oodles to choose from. My tendency is to gravitate toward the “magic” Pooh ornaments, the ones that cost quite a pretty penny to begin with. With the hefty discount, prohibitive prices suddenly dissipate, and I manage to convince myself that this keepsake is well worth the slashed amount. Last year, my big after-Christmas purchase was O Christmas Tree!, a deluxe ornament from the Winnie the Pooh collection.

The box reads, “Pooh says, ‘Let’s go caroling!’ / He loves a Christmas song. Tigger bounces by in time / To join the sing-along. / Eeyore’s part is listening / (He gets the notes all wrong), / While merry Piglet sings / And jingles ding-a-ding-a-dong!” It’s a large, cream-colored box with two pieces of plastic inside molded to fit around the figure, which, despite a ring upon the golden plastic star on the tree that is the centerpiece, really doesn’t seem to be designed for use on an actual evergreen.

One reason for this is that the tree is made out of a different material than the base and figures that are on top of it. Instead of being hard plastic, it’s bristly like a scrub brush. It doesn’t seem sturdy enough to support much weight. Another is that this ornament is designed to sit flat , so hanging it really doesn’t make sense. There’s usually at least one new Pooh display piece like this out every year; at this point, they’ve pretty much taken over our piano.

This ornament has a light blue base, on the bottom of which is a silver wind-up key. Along side of the base, which is circular with a three-inch diameter, are written the words “O Christmas tree! O Christmas tree! Of all the trees most lovely...” This base is about an inch tall, with a ridge of sparkling snow around the top. The surface on top of which the characters are situated is a powdery blue, with an island of snow in the middle, upon which rests the dark green, snow-covered Christmas tree.

Four characters are participants in this festive little gathering. Pooh, about an inch and three quarters tall, has a wide smile on his face as he sings, open book in hand. The implication, of course, is that he is reading the words to a carol, though I never got the impression that Pooh was much good at reading. Same goes for Tigger and Piglet, for that matter. But maybe the books are just for show; after all, the pages are blank. Pooh wears a light blue scarf and Tigger, “standing” on his scrunched-up tail, wears a green one. Piglet, in between them and about a quarter of an inch shorter, has a lavender scarf and carries a golden bell.

Eeyore, opposite Piglet, wears no jolly adornments at all, just the usual pink ribbon on his tail. His head is cocked as if to listen, as the poem suggests, though since he is part of the procession, it seems he would chime in a bit more. He doesn’t look like an observer; he comes off as one of the carolers. If it weren’t for the verse on the box, I’d suspect that he has no book because he’s more skilled at memorizing than the others. And as a donkey, I don’t know how he would tie a scarf around his own neck; I would hope that someone might take a hint away from this outing, though, and give him a scarf for Christmas, and offer to attach it as well.

There’s only limited space around this tree, so I can‘t complain too much about missing characters. One might imagine that the other residents of the Hundred Acre Wood are standing off beyond the boundaries of the ornament, listening appreciatively. I’m sure Kanga and Roo would enjoy such a performance, though I doubt Roo would sit still and listen for long; he’d want to jump in at the first opportunity! Christopher Robin would certainly lend an ear. Gopher, Rabbit and Owl all have more cantankerous dispositions, but at this time of year, one would hope that they would be inclined to be a good audience. I’m a little surprised the sculptor didn’t sneak Rabbit in here, though; I would expect him to have organized this little excursion himself, making it much more complicated than necessary. And there’s a space between Eeyore and Pooh that would probably be large enough to accommodate Rabbit, certainly if the others shifted a smidgen.

But the four characters we get are wonderfully vibrant and detailed and when one winds the key, the track they are on revolves around the tree to the tinkly tune of O Christmas Tree. It’s like a Hundred Acre Wood merry-go-round. The figures themselves don’t actually move in relation to the ground or each other, so the movement is not very sophisticated, and at times the key gets stuck and the turning stops before it should. Picking the ornament up or just rearranging it a bit usually fixes the problem. This isn’t my favorite of the “magic” Pooh ornaments that I have, but I do get a smile out of it. Pooh and his pals can come caroling in my neighborhood any time!