Former Faculty Member Paul Thomas About His Christmas Book, The Pine Child

Alumni Office (AO): What is “The Pine Child” about?  

Paul Thomas (PT): It’s a Christmas fairy tale about a young pine tree. It is growing up in a forest where it is surrounded by many tall pines. The only part of the sky it can see is straight up. Its dearest wish and life ambition is to grow tall enough to see the whole horizon and watch the sunrise and the sunset, but when winter comes, it gets cut down to be used as a Christmas tree. At first, it is sad and angry that it will never achieve its wish, but three children decorate it and show it a lot of love and affection, which changes the pine child's heart. It forms a new wish that, if it comes true, will change the children's lives forever.  

AO: You describe it as a Christmas story, so why does the story begin in summer and end in Spring?  

PT: When your main character is a tree, there are certain limitations you have to deal with. You cannot tell an action-adventure story about a tree, so to broaden the scope and action, I set the story of the pine child against the changing of the seasons and personified the seasons as gods or mythic spirits who compete for seasonal dominance over the Northern Hemisphere.  

AO: How did you come to write this story?  

PT: I wrote the first version of it a long time ago, in the 1980s, when I was at Breck and had ambitions to be a poet. The English department was full of poets in those days. Michael Moos had published extensively, and Tom Hegg had had tremendous success with his Christmas poem, A Cup of Christmas Tea. Frank Eustis was, and still is, a thoughtful poet. I was part of this community and had the ambition to write a narrative poem. It did not occur to me that narrative poems had been out of fashion in the United States since Longfellow wrote The Song of Hiawatha more than 150 years ago. As you can probably guess, the first version was not very good, and I was not happy with it, so I put it aside for what turned out to be about thirty years.  

AO: What made you pick it up again?  

PT: About ten years ago, I reread the two literary works that had done a lot to inspire the story. One was The Tomten by the Swedish writer Astrid Lindgren, who is probably best known as the author of the Pippi Longstocking books. That book was published in the early 1960s, and I was fascinated by it as a child because it captured the silent mystery of a night in deep winter, and, growing up in Duluth, that resonated with me. The other was “The Fir Tree,” a story by Hans Christian Andersen, the  Danish writer of fairy tales. That was a negative inspiration because I hated it, and I  still do. It’s a sad and painful story about a Christmas tree that is treated with heartless cruelty, it’s mocked and called ugly by children, tossed into a dark attic to wither after Christmas, and is finally chopped up for firewood and burned. It’s just a horrible tale of crushed hopes. As a little kid, I used to talk to our Christmas trees—they were friends, I guess I was a weird and lonely kid—and treating a Christmas tree that way would have been unimaginable to me. I wrote The Pine Child partly as a rebuke to Hans Christian Andersen.  

AO: Any other influences on The Pine Child?  

PT: I’d have to say John Keats, one of my poet heroes, and I consciously tried to make the language of the story rich and lyrical like Keats. I’d also have to mention Tolkien, who has influenced me since I first read The Lord of the Rings when I was thirteen. One of Tolkien’s most wonderful inventions are the Ents, the tree shepherds of Fangorn forest, who are led by Treebeard. There is a sadness about the Ents because they are going extinct, and they also take a long time to think things through and to say things—trees have a different sense of time than humans—and so I owe a debt to Tolkien for some of the personality traits of my tree characters. 

AO: This book is lavishly illustrated. How did that develop?  

PT: It came about through good fortune. I had hired an artist who failed to produce any artwork, and I was complaining about it to my sister-in-law, Marisa Coughlan ’92, whom you interviewed just a few weeks ago for her excellent new movie, Blue Eyed Girl. Marisa said, “You should talk to my friend Katie McCollow, she’s great,  and she’s a really talented artist.” So I did that, and Katie and I hit it off immediately: we realized we both liked the same classical illustrators – N.C. Wyeth, Michael  Hague, Arthur Rackham, Jessie Wilcox. I was very excited to work with her, and she produced more than fifty original watercolors for the book. Early on, she created a piece that reminded me of Michelangelo’s famous sculpture, the Pieta, so I mentioned that to Katie, and she said she had been thinking about that when she created the piece. At that moment, I realized not only that I had found the right artist, but also that Katie McCollow was capable of raising this work to a sublime level. Katie’s contribution has transformed a good story into a truly remarkable work. I’m totally honored and thrilled to be associated with her.  

AO: Can you talk about The Pine Child audiobook?  

PT: The audiobook is an excellent ensemble reading of the story. In addition to being an extremely talented painter, Katie McCollow works as a voice-over performer. She helped me assemble a distinguished cast of professional actors, including Guy Messenger and Justen Jones, both of whom have extensive film and television credits, and her daughter, Molly McCollow, a stage actor in New York, who read the part of the pine child. Two of my children are in it, and two of Marisa Coughlan’s children are in it as well, and there are many great sound effects. The best way for a younger child to experience the Pine Child is to read along with the audiobook. 

You can buy The Pine Child at Gabbrohead.com, Amazon.com, and through bookstores. The audiobook version is available on all streaming platforms, including Apple Books, Audible, and Spotify.

Due to video editing, a few former faculty colleagues whom Paul mentioned were removed, including John Severn, Laurie Bohne, Tim Rosenfield, Mickael York, Carol Raths, Brad Peterson, Paul Lundgren, Jake Miller, and Dulcinee Walsh.

You can watch his video interview here.