Rowling Talks About ‘Christmas Pig’

Comments

1. John says

   December 21, 2021 at 12:22 pm

   I confess that I didn’t watch this video — shame on me — because it seemed a fan-servicing exercise rather than Rowling speaking to subjects I might find interesting. Snobbery has consequences!

   Beatrice Groves wrote me this week with the news that in this conversation The Presence revealed “the muddy blue bunny in Christmas Pig was a reference to the fact that JKR’s daughter really had found such a toy.” Sure enough, at the 7:30 mark of this interview, at which point the embedded url above is now cued for your convenience, Rowling relates:

   The Blue Bunny was also inspired by a real life incident in my family. My youngest daughter, she found a muddy little blue bunny in the flower bed that had obviously been there for years. And just like the mother in the story, I said, ‘It will break the washing machine if we put that bunny in the washing machine.’ She really begged me to keep it and she still has that blue bunny which must have been dropped by a child in the garden a long time ago but we managed to clean Blue Bunny up pretty well. So that was also inspired by something that happened in my family.

   How important this is would be hard to overstate. As Prof Groves reminded me, Mackenzie’s middle name is ‘Jean,’ and the connection I hadn’t made, that this was the source of the story ‘Jeannie.’ This, with the Blue Bunny’s assumption into Up There consequent to his sacrificial love for Jack a la Dobby, ties together Rowling’s John-Peter theme and the connection of Mother’s love with the God Who is Love in all her work.

   A big thanks to Bea Groves for this great catch and and to Nick Jeffery helping me find it in the video.

   I confess that I still haven’t watched the whole thing; please share here any more great finds in the gift wrapped package I’m neglecting to search!