The Christmas Calf by George Woodard captures the essence of a true holiday miracle through the perspective of a 9-year-old farm boy. On a cold Christmas Eve, this young boy's curiosity and care lead him to the barn, where a cow is expected to give birth. In the quiet, snowy night, he experiences the wonder and mystery of new life, illuminated by the magic of the season. Woodard’s storytelling transports readers to this heartwarming moment, making The Christmas Calf a memorable tale for all ages.
The story came to George Woodard back in the early 2000s when he was sitting in a meadow admiring his cows on a warm sunny afternoon with his 8-year-old son at the time.
“I said ‘Henry, I got a story to tell you.’ So, I started telling the story and it was off the top of my head. I didn’t know where I was going with it and it just kind of worked,” says retired third-generation dairy farmer George Woodard. “About 12 years later I thought to myself, ‘That’s a pretty good story.’ So, I started writing it down.”
Unable to figure out how to word the ending, the story sat on a shelf for another 12 years.
“Every once in a while, I’d go, ‘I got to work on that thing.’ Well, last December I decided I needed to finish it,” Woodard says. “So, I got up one morning at four o’clock and started finishing the text. I got the text all done and then the very next day I started drawing pictures for it.”
Writing the ending was the biggest challenge, Woodard says, because he felt it had to be written a certain way, so that it had a little bit of a punch to it but also a heartwarming ending.
“Writing the last couple pages held me up for 12 years, but the drawings were not hard,” Woodard says. “I could draw about four pictures in a couple hours in pencil and then I inked them afterward. The pictures were not really hard, just time-consuming.”
Image provided by George Woodard.
In total, the book contains about 65 pictures.
“I’ve made a couple movies and when you make a movie you have to either write up a shot list or do some storyboarding. So, when drawing this children’s book I would realize ‘Oh, I need a reaction shot here’ or ‘Oh, I need a point of view picture of what’s happening here,’” Woodard says. “So, there’s a lot of pictures in it and it shows that one night where the boy goes to the barn on Christmas Eve to help a cow have a calf.”
Once Woodard finished the pictures, he had a book designer friend help him lay the pages out a certain way so that page-turner images were on the right-hand side of the book.
“My friend had a publisher over in Maine that we used and I self-published the book,” Woodard says. “I couldn't believe my eyes when we opened the box how good it looked.”
Woodard says he has had the book for almost a month now and has taken it into bookstores in Vermont to see if they’d be interested in taking a few of them.
“I show them the cover, and everybody goes, ‘Oh my word.’ It’s not anything flashy. It’s just a black and white picture with red lettering that says The Christmas Calf. So, it makes me feel good to hear that people like it,” Woodard says. “I also like it when people say, ‘I remember doing those things’ and to hear people say, ‘Oh boy, I remember doing that.’”
Woodard says it’s important to him to be able to show historical events in a way that they were in a particular time period.
“The cartoon characters in the book are like a real-life slice of a small farm in that time period,” Woodard says. “The drawings and the outdoor winter scenes feel cold and I think partly the black and white images help with those feelings.”
Of all the things Woodard has done in his 72 years of life, he is most proud of the fact that he was a successful small dairy farmer of 25 Holstein cows for 48 years in Waterbury Center, Vermont.
“It’s the most important thing I’ve done,” Woodard says. “None of the stories or pictures I’ve made would have happened if I hadn’t been a dairy farmer.”
Despite having a small herd of cows to milk every day, it never stopped George Woodard from directing, shooting and editing two farm-related critically acclaimed feature films. The Summer of Walter Hacks, a mystery adventure where an 11-year-old fiddle-playing farm boy in 1952 rides around town on his bicycle fixing farm equipment. And The Farm Boy, a WWII-era love story about a young man who drives milk truck for his father and later ends up in Belgium in what would become the Battle of the Bulge. Both films are in black and white using camera techniques of those time periods.
To order and read Woodard’s book The Christmas Calf, visit georgewoodard.com. Woodard says he has three more ideas for books and hopes to write another screenplay this winter to shoot next summer.
“Every farmer who milks cows has to go to the barn at some point in the middle of the night to check on a cow to see if she's all right,” Woodard says. “I don't know how many times I've done it. Sometimes there's no calf, sometimes there's a calf and sometimes you have to help with the calf. It's just one of those things you don't mind doing because it's all part of it. That’s how this story came about.”
