Seasons of Pooh

A quiet, fairly simple day today. I slept in and watched Winnie the Pooh: Seasons of Giving while I ate a late breakfast/brunch. It's a cute collection of two winter/Christmas related episodes of The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh and the surprisingly good Thanksgiving special.

I first encountered Winnie the Pooh's Thanksgiving on ABC I believe in 1998, the year before it was added to this video. I don't know if they run it anymore, but they should. It's actually quite good, better than the Hundred Acre Woods gang's Christmas special from a few years before. The original gang is ready to have a Pooh-style Thanksgiving feast, with all their favorite foods (like honey and thistles)...until Rabbit butts in and tells his friends that this simply isn't how Thanksgiving IS. Pooh, Tigger, Eeyore, Owl, Gopher, and Piglet try to comply to Rabbit's orders, but turkey and cranberries are simply hard to come by.

In the end, Rabbit learns a lesson similar to the point my friend Linda Young makes in her wonderful essay on Thanksgiving. It doesn't matter what you eat for Thanksgiving. It matters whom you share the feast with...and being thankful for the food and friends you do have.

(One very mild nitpick. As enjoyable as the Thanksgiving special is...Pooh and his pals are really British, so would they even know about this holiday? Christopher Robin even retains his accent in his brief appearances.)

The two winter-themed cartoons both come from The New Adventures Of Winnie The Pooh. The Groundhog Day-themed one was ok, but the final cartoon involving Rabbit and the little bird he adopts, Kessie, was genuinely touching.

The rest of the day passed quietly. I browsed in a few stores, but most of the Thanksgiving stuff was gone from AC Moore and I didn't see anything I liked at the Dollar Store or Super Fresh. I spent my two hours at the library organizing the business and financial books, which weren't quite as messy as the sports or world history sections, and certainly nothing like the kid's DVDs. I would have taken even less time if I hadn't lingered over a couple of books...