Winnie-the-Pooh turns 100 today.
Actually, that’s not quite true. Yes, A.A. Milne’s beloved book Winnie-the-Pooh, with equally beloved illustrations by E.H. Shepard, was first published on October 14, 1926. But the eponymous bear first appeared by name in a short story—illustrated by J.H. Dowd rather than Shepard—that Milne then expanded into the first chapter of what quickly became and has remained a classic of children’s literature. That story, “The Wrong Sort of Bees,” came out in London’s Evening News on Christmas Eve 1925; the previous year, Milne had written a poem for Punch that features Edward Bear, who, even in a brief appearance, is recognizably Winnie-the-Pooh’s prototype.
And perhaps Winnie-the-Pooh would never have had a birthday at all had a very young Christopher Robin Milne not received a stuffed bear from Harrods from his mother in 1921, only a little over a decade after people began speaking about “teddy bears.”
I imagine that Winnie-the-Pooh was read to me before I had a copy of my own, but I know for sure that I first leafed through the pages myself on my third birthday. I know this because my parents, in an experiment in delayed gratification, bought the four-part boxed set of the Pooh books (Winnie-the-Pooh, The House at Pooh Corner, When We Were Very Young, and Now We Are Six) and gave me one a year until finally I was 6.
It hardly makes me special that I loved the books then and love them still now, both for myself and for my 3-year-old daughter. But one passage in particular has stuck with me. I recite it to myself often: