Christmas Eve marks a very special anniversary: 100 years since Winnie-the-Pooh was introduced to the world, in a short story for the London Evening News. In honour of his centenary, children’s laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce is asking a cast of children’s authors and listeners of Radio 4 a question fundamental to our personalities: “Who are you in Winnie-the-Pooh?” In this five-part series, Michael Morpurgo picks Piglet, Cressida Cowell goes for Tigger, but it is Nick Butterworth (Percy the Park Keeper) and Julia Donaldson (The Gruffalo) who identify most with the bear himself. They celebrate his capacity for friendship, modesty and ability just to live in the moment. “It’s very hard to write a nice person,” our authors agree. Maybe that’s why AA Milne decided instead to write a nice bear.
This is the kind of cosy festive content we expect from the BBC. But it is not all saccharine nostalgia – there is much we can learn from these beloved children’s books, from the difference between knowledge and wisdom (as exemplified by Rabbit and Owl), to the management of anxiety (Piglet) and importance of accepting ourselves and our friends for who we are. One Chanukah, I was given a copy of Pooh and the Philosophers, in which John Tyerman Williams explains millennia of Western thought through the musings of our ursine hero. There is something profound about Pooh. “He eats those sandwiches in abstraction!” Cottrell-Boyce exclaims. “I can’t think of any other character in literature who carries that idea of reverie.”
With Christopher Robin getting older, the final chapter of The House at Pooh Corner reads: “Wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the forest, a little boy and his bear will always be playing.” I challenge anyone to read that line without tears in their eyes. The bittersweetness of growing up is a very big lesson to learn from this bear of supposedly “very little brain”. Happy birthday, Winnie-the-Pooh.
Who Are You in Winnie-the-Pooh?
BBC Radio 4. Christmas Week, daily at 1.45pm
[Further reading: Let’s hear it for The Rest is History]
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This article appears in the 12 Dec 2025 issue of the New Statesman, All Alone: Christmas Special 2025
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