Talking animals, playing instruments and dancing? They have long been featured in children’s stories, going back to Aesop’s Fables. Springing from our imagination, which is particularly fertile when we are young, they acquire a life of their own which delights us, in the “willing suspension of disbelief” that is an underlying principle of all theater.
George Woodard has never lost his creative imagination. As a professional actor, as the founder of the Groundhog Opry variety show and as the writer and director of two beautiful and powerful full length films, “The Summer of Walter Hacks” and “The Farm Boy,” he has found ways of expressing himself in a variety of mediums for decades, while simultaneously working as a dairy farmer in Waterbury Center.
His latest endeavor is a children’s book he wrote and illustrated, “The Christmas Calf” from the Old Cuss Press. Entirely in black and white appropriate to the winter season, it’s hero, Henry, is a nine-year-old boy who knows just what to do helping a heifer give birth to its first calf on Christmas Eve. With some parallels to the Nativity story of Christ’s birth in a stable, the images also resonate with the ancient archetypal celebration of the rebirth of the sun at this time in the winter solstice. The miracle of a baby being born, which is quite complicated and fraught with some danger, must leave us in awe of the continuity of all life on earth.
Children raised on farms not only develop a strong work ethic but they are intuitive problem solvers, and Henry had seen his father deliver calves before, so he didn’t hesitate to act decisively in this emergency when the heifer was having difficulties.
The best children’s books are those that both parents and their sons and daughters enjoy reading together, and which have intriguing illustrations, and “The Christmas Calf” succeeds in both ways. Woodard makes fantasy believable and a nine-year-old boy an admirable role model for us all.
For more information and availability, go online at georgewoodard.com or [email protected].
David K. Rodgers
David K. Rodgers is a writer, mason and card carrying dilettante, who dabbles and babbles in art. He has lived in East Craftsbury for the past 40 years.
