For a bear of very little brain, Winnie-the-Pooh has had an outsized century. On October 14, 2026, the Grande Prairie Public Library will mark the 100th anniversary of A. A. Milne's honey-loving creation with a day of activities in the children's department and a Storytime program beginning at 2:00 p.m. It is free, drop-in, and open to anyone who wanders in — no ticket, no registration barrier, just a library doing what libraries do.
The date is not arbitrary. Milne's first collection of Pooh stories, Winnie-the-Pooh, illustrated by E. H. Shepard, was published in 1926. The character had actually appeared by name a year earlier, in a children's story Milne wrote on commission for London's Evening News for Christmas Eve 1925. But it was the 1926 book — followed by The House at Pooh Corner in 1928 — that fixed the inhabitants of the Hundred Acre Wood in the world's imagination. A second anniversary quietly rides along with the first: on January 1, 2022, the original 1926 Winnie-the-Pooh entered the public domain in the United States, freeing Milne and Shepard's text and illustrations for anyone to copy, adapt, or reimagine. Tigger, who first appeared in the 1928 book, stayed under copyright a while longer.
What makes the centenary especially worth celebrating in Canada — and particularly fitting for an Alberta library — is that Pooh's name leads back to a real bear, and a real Canadian soldier. In August 1914, as the First World War began, Lieutenant Harry Colebourn of The Fort Garry Horse, a Canadian cavalry regiment, was travelling by troop train toward Valcartier, Quebec. The train stopped at White River, Ontario. Colebourn, a veterinarian, bought a black bear cub from a hunter for $20. His diary entry for August 24, 1914, is famously terse: "Bought bear $20." He named her Winnipeg, after his adopted hometown, and she became "Winnie" to everyone who met her.
Winnie travelled with Colebourn to England, where she became a mascot of sorts for his unit. When the regiment was posted to France, he left her in the care of the London Zoo. She stayed there from 1915 until her death in 1934, and by the end of the war she was one of the zoo's most popular animals. Colebourn visited her whenever he was on leave, and on December 1, 1919, he formally handed her over to the zoo. It was at the London Zoo that a young Christopher Robin Milne — A. A. Milne's son — encountered the bear, and the name stuck to the boy's own stuffed toy.
That stuffed toy, and its companions, are themselves survivors. Christopher Robin's original animals — the teddy bear known as Edward Bear, plus Eeyore, Piglet, Kanga, and Tigger — are held by the New York Public Library, where they have been on display for decades. Roo, another of the originals, was lost. The toys' survival is part of why the story behind the story surfaced only gradually; it wasn't until the 1980s that the real Winnie's history became widely known. A statue of Captain Colebourn and the bear was erected in Winnipeg in 1992, and the London Zoo already had one of its own.
The Grande Prairie event is a modest, local echo of a very large cultural anniversary — the kind of programming that public libraries specialize in. The library serves the City of Grande Prairie, the County of Grande Prairie, and the Municipal District of Greenview, and its children's department is the natural home for a Pooh celebration: the books are, after all, children's literature first, and the centenary is an excuse to reintroduce a 1926 text to a new generation of readers. Activities will be set up in the children's department throughout the day, with the Storytime and program running from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m.
There is also a small, practical wrinkle worth noting for anyone planning around the event. The library has flagged that Alberta's recent time-zone changes have been causing its events calendar to display incorrect start and end times for some programs in November and beyond. The Pooh anniversary is dated October 14, 2026, on the library's own listing, and the address — 101, 9839 103 Avenue — is in Grande Prairie, which observes Mountain Time. Visitors would be wise to confirm the time with the library directly rather than relying solely on a calendar entry.
A hundred years on, the appeal of the stories has proved durable in a way few children's books manage. They are gentle, funny, and quietly philosophical — a bear who thinks hard about very little, a donkey who expects the worst, a small pig who is braver than he believes. Milne wrote them for his son, and the son's toys are still in a glass case in New York. The bear who gave them their name was bought for $20 on a train platform in Ontario by a man on his way to war. On a Wednesday afternoon in October, a library in northwestern Alberta will add its own small chapter to that unlikely story — with a storytime, some activities, and, one assumes, a jar of honey somewhere in the room.