I recall Bruce Talkington as one of my least favorite Pooh writers. Here's a collection of six of his holiday stories, so I guess I'll see if that memory is correct. In fact, I'm not sure we ever managed to get all the way through this book before, but I shall endure for the sake of the Pooh Project.

Winnie the Pooh's Valentine - 2 stars
Roo wants to give Kanga a special Valentine. All his Hundred-Acre friends pitch in to help make a monstrosity that just won't work. But it's not a complete failure because it inspires Roo to try something that does. The story is not bad, but the prose and wordplay used to tell it really grate.

Winnie the Pooh's Easter - 1 star
OMG! This awful story makes absolutely no sense. A giant Easter egg -- four to five feet tall -- appears in the Hundred-Acre Wood. Rabbit says it's supposed to talk, because y'know, Easter eggs talk. To coax it into talking, the Pooh friends paint their entire bodies in different Easter egg colors and patterns to make it "feel at home" with them. Then Christopher Robin reveals it is actually a giant present consisting of a series of eggs nesting inside each other and miraculously painted in advance with the very designs the Pooh friends spontaneously decided to paint themselves mere minutes before. And this is when we discover that Christopher Robin apparently grows up to be Criss Angel because my mind is freaked! This is an abridged version of the original storybook, so I don't know if the missing words somehow make this make sense.

Winnie the Pooh's April Fools' Day - 1 star
This dreadful tale has the Pooh friends getting into a bunch of stupid slapstick situations as they try to capture the April Fool -- because everyone knows he's a real person? -- so he won't play tricks on them this April 1st. Talkington used to work on "The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh," and this really feels like a lost episode from that old TV series. Indeed, there is an episode called "April Pooh" in the third season from 1990 that has a very similar plot and makes a lot more sense than this 1996 sequel of sorts that Talkington has slapped together.

Winnie the Pooh's Halloween - 2 stars
The Pooh friends decide to dress up in spooky costumes for Halloween -- everyone except Piglet, who decides to hide in his house. It's a little interesting to see what costume each one chooses and what that tells us about their fears and personality. But a mysterious sound sends them all scrabbling for safety at Piglet's, and the twist ending is about as dumb and inexplicable as they come.

Winnie the Pooh's Thanksgiving - 2 stars
Pooh is very thankful for the good things in his life and throws a picnic feast for his friends.
What's that, Christopher Robin? Oh, it's Thanksgiving. What's Thanksgiving? And you have another feast ready to eat? Well, what a perfectly silly coincidence.

Winnie the Pooh's Christmas - 3 stars
Last pitch, and Talkington finally gets one over the plate! Pooh manages to give thoughtful Christmas presents without giving it any thought at all. How very Pooh.

So, yep, I remembered correctly, and Talkington is a very poor Pooh prose producer. And the annoying and cloying little introductions to each story describing the holiday and offering a small craft don't help the book at all.

FOR REFERENCE

Contents:
• Introduction: Celebrating the Holidays with Winnie the Pooh
• Winnie the Pooh's Valentine's Day [originally published as Winnie the Pooh's Valentine; written by Bruce Talkington, illustrated by John Kurtz]
• Winnie the Pooh's Easter [abridged version; written by Bruce Talkington, illustrated by Bill Langley and Diana Wakeman]
• Winnie the Pooh's April Fools' Day [originally published as Winnie The Pooh's Silly Day; written by Bruce Talkington, illustrated by Robbin Cuddy]
• Winnie the Pooh's Halloween [written by Bruce Talkington, illustrated by John Kurtz]
• Winnie the Pooh's Thanksgiving [Written by Bruce Talkington, illustrated by John Kurtz]
• Winnie the Pooh's Christmas [written by Bruce Talkington, illustrated by Alvin S. White Studio]

(My Pooh Project: I love Winnie the Pooh, and so does my wife. Having a daughter gave us a chance to indoctrinate her into the cult by buying and reading her every Pooh book we came across. How many is that? I’m going to count them this year by reading and reviewing one every day and seeing which month I finally run out. Track my progress here:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/23954351-rod-brown?ref=nav_mybooks&she... ) ( )