Every Who Down in Who-ville Liked Christmas a lot . . . But the Grinch, Who lived just north of Who-ville, Did NOT!

These opening lines come from Dr. Seuss’s illustrated children’s book *How the Grinch Stole Christmas!* (1957). Written in anapestic, rhyming verse, the passage sets up the central conflict: the communal joy of the Whos versus the Grinch’s isolated resentment. Seuss created the Grinch as a comic embodiment of holiday sourness and alienation, and the book appeared in postwar America amid increasingly commercialized Christmas culture. The emphatic “Did NOT!”—typographically shouted—introduces the Grinch’s contrarian stance and primes the reader for the plot in which he attempts to sabotage the Whos’ celebration, only to discover that their Christmas spirit persists without material trappings.

The stanza works like a miniature fable: it contrasts a cohesive community (“Every Who…liked Christmas”) with a solitary figure defined by negation. The exaggerated capitalization of “NOT” signals that the Grinch’s problem is not mere preference but a hardened refusal—an identity built around opposition. Seuss uses simple diction and rhythmic momentum to make the moral stakes legible to children: joy can be shared and communal, while bitterness isolates. The lines also foreshadow the book’s larger argument that Christmas is not reducible to possessions; the Grinch’s initial hostility is tied to envy and estrangement, which the story later resolves through empathy and belonging.