Come, Teddy!

It was the end of my first year of teaching, and there was some kind of program to celebrate it. I must be getting old now, as I don't recall the event, except that it was in the orange and brown 70's-style fellowship room below the church school gymnasium. At the end of the program the school board chair called me up to thank me for my service that year... and handed me the gift of a brown teddy bear.

I drove home from the event rather bemused. A teddy bear? I was a 24-year old who thought herself an adult. Why had I been given a child's toy to celebrate what I considered a fair adult accomplishment: surviving my first year of teaching? Was this just another one of those cultural things that I didn't yet understand about living in the United States?

I set the teddy bear on my bed, a place where teddies seem to belong. Over the next fifteen years that bear kept his honored place. He was held close when I needed a good cry, and snuggled with at times when I just wanted more pillows and soft stuff in the bed with me. "Crybear," as I eventually christened him, only retired when I got married and moved north.

According to the sources I found, the teddy bear was named after Teddy Roosevelt, who was unable to bag a bear on one of his Mississippi hunting expeditions. A friend heard of his disappointment and captured a bear, clubbing it and tying it to a tree so Roosevelt could shoot it. The president declined to do so, citing unsportsmanlike behavior, and insisted that the bear be put it out of its misery by someone else. Apparently a shop owner saw a political cartoon that had been drawn of the incident, and made a little "teddy bear" to put in his shop window as a toy. And thus it began.

I found other versions of this story, perhaps a bit more kindly than the one I've cited above. I would prefer the kindlier versions, which have Roosevelt setting a bear cub free. Regardless, we have had teddy bears around for over 100 years now, and that's the part to enjoy. 

Teddy bears range in size, shape and materials all the way from those early teddy bears that were made to look more like real bears, to my Crybear, to Mr. Bean's "Teddy"--and who can forget that crazy Mr. Bean spending Christmas with his loved and abused Teddy?

I think every teddy bear, because they're so soft and snuggly, comes with some story that bears (pun intended) being shared. Have you had a treasured teddy bear? What was his name? Have you kept him?