If you had the choice of all kinds of fictional characters to spend Christmas with, and yes, there are an awful lot of them – although, to be fair, avoiding the xenomorphs from Alien or Pennywise from IT may keep a lot more festive – picking the residents of the Hundred Acre Wood as your festive season companions would be a wise and joyous decision.
In the 2002 anthology Winnie the Pooh: A Very Merry Pooh Year, which happily brings together Winnie the Pooh and Christmas Too (1991) and an all-new New Year’s Eve story, it becomes abundantly clear very quickly that celebrating the season with Pooh and Tiger (both voiced by Jim Cummings), Piglet (John Fiedler), Eeyore (Peter Cullen), Rabbit (Ken Ransom), Roo and Kanga (Nikita Hopkins and Kath Soucie) and Gopher (Michael Gough) would make for the most wonderful of get-togethers.
A family of quite divergent personalities who get along despite all of Piglet’s fearfulness, Pooh’s obsession with hunny and forgetfulness with presents, Rabbit’s uptightness and Tigger’s bouncingly OTT approach to every situation, helped of course in their familial togetherness by the calmly thoughtful words of Christopher Robin (William Green), these adorable friends can’t help but make Christmas and NYE feel like the special times everyone hopes they will be.
It helps, for a start, that they come to everything with the sincerity and loveliness invested in them by A. A. Milne, who gave them their first taste of literary life in 1926’s Winnie the Pooh – though Pooh made his initial appearance in 1924’s When We Were Very Young as Edward Bear – filled with an exuberance of love and enthusiasm for life in general.
You can’t help but feel immensely better after spending time with Pooh and friends, who, even when a letter to Santa goes astray imperilling the gifts of which they are dreaming, know in the end that what matters is that they all together to celebrate Christmas.
In fact, one of the most touching scenes in Winnie the Pooh: A Very Merry Pooh Year, drawn from the Christmas special part of it which is included as a remembrance of a Christmas when everything every nearly went terribly wrong, but didn’t, is when Pooh has rather selflessly gone to deliver the errant letter to the North Pole and everyone else realises they would rather have Pooh with them for Christmas than all the gifts they had hyper-enthusiastically dreamed might be theirs.
With other characters or less well-written ones anyway, this all might come across as a tad too earnest and twee but when you’re with Pooh and Tigger, Piglet Rabbit and Eeyore, it feels like the most natural, heartwarmingly beautiful thing in the world.
Gifts don’t matter as much as people, even though red bow-wrapped jars of hunny for breakfast, lunch and dinner are quite lovely, and Winnie the Pooh: A Very Merry Pooh Year makes that gloriously clear, sprinkling this important message with sweet humour, Milne-esque lines of dialogue that bring the characters to traditional life (even if they are a little Disneyfied) and a warm sense of inclusion, the kind that makes you feel like anything is possible if you’re friends are with you.
Christmas done and sorted, rescued by some overly-excitable but fun to watch decorating by Tigger who happily flings baubles and tinsel around with the kind of glee that Christmas all but demands, everyone moves onto New Year where Pooh is still trying to find the present he hid for Piglet somewhere and Christopher Robin has decided they must have a party, likely at Rabbit’s house, although Pooh, god bless him, forgets to tell Rabbit he is hosting.
He means to, of course, but what with hunny distracting him, things scaring Piglet and Tigger bouncing through the snow, aided by his new Christmas present of a tail-sized snowshoe, he gets a little off course, triggering off a train of comedically-inspired chaotic events that lead Rabbit, who simply wants to keep his final carrot of the season safe, to decide to go and live somewhere more peaceful.
His announced soon-to-be departure sends everyone into a mournful panic with the gang deciding they need to not be themselves to keep Rabbit in his snug tree home (his home and everyone else’s are so adorably cosy and lovely that you could happily live in the Hundred Acre Wood without a second thought) but it doesn’t work because Piglet will always be cutely afraid, Eeyore taciturn and appealingly mournful, Pooh in love with hunny and Tigger awash in more bouncy energy than one seasonal celebration can ever fully accommodate.
They fail at not being them and thank goodness because we love them as they are, as does Rabbit, who decides to stick around with his special friends who almost matter more than his beloved potted carrot.
There is a joyous perfection to Winnie the Pooh: A Very Merry Pooh Year, whether it’s Pooh and Piglet pretending to be Santy Claus (not a typo) or Rabbit fending his carrot patch from militaristic-looking bugs or a boisterous rendition of “Jingley Bells” (also not a typo) that buoys the spirit, enveloping you in a gorgeous spirit-affirming reminder that the world can be a wondrously good and lovely place, especially at Christmas and New Year, if you have your very special friends and family around you.
It’s hard not to feel renewed after watching a special like this because it doesn’t over-sentimentalise things, choosing instead to let the friendships and love between Pooh and his friends stand front and centre, letting all the uplifting messaging of the season flow truly sincere and affectingly out of story that has its shares of downs and mishaps but also an abundance of ups too, leaving you feeling like, pandemic or not, life has a lot of delightful and special things to offer especially at the most wonderful time of year, made all the more wonderful naturally by being in the Hundred Acre Wood where everything always feels much better.
Winnie the Pooh: A Very Merry Pooh Year is available to stream on Disney+