Adapted posthumously from the illustration for the 1957 book, How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

Dr. Seuss begins his story with the premise that “every Who down in Who-ville liked Christmas a lot” and their closest neighbor, The Grinch, did not! In his final summation of why The Grinch “hated” Christmas, Dr. Seuss lands on the simple fact that “his heart was two sizes too small.”  So how does one’s heart end up in such a state?

In December 1957, Ted Geisel revealed how the previous Christmas had left him peering at “a very Grinch-ish countenance in the mirror.” He realized that “something had gone wrong with Christmas . . . or more likely with me.  So I wrote the story to see if I could rediscover something about Christmas that obviously I’d lost.”  The moment of redemption in Dr. Seuss’s book is when, after having stolen all the toys from his neighboring Whos down in Who-ville, they still wake up singing on Christmas morning.

As Seuss writes: “And after he puzzled over it until his “puzzler was sore, ‘Maybe Christmas,’ he thought, ‘doesn’t come from a store. Maybe Christmas . . . perhaps . . . means a little bit more!’”  When writing The Grinch, Dr. Seuss was expressing his own 53-year-old concerns about the holiday. It took Seuss time to figure out how he felt about Christmas, but as he would later say of The Grinch, “It’s not how you start out that counts. It’s what you are at the finish.”