Wolf Moon in children's book

Dear Penny....I have some questions about your book, When the Moon is Full: A Lunar Year.

On the page for January, you say it is "The Wolf Moon." Beneath the poem on that page, you say "Native Americans believed that wolves became restless in January."

I see at least two problems with that statement.

Do you mean to tell us that all Native Americans call January "The Wolf Moon?"

You use a past tense verb. Do Native Americans (whichever ones you're talking about) no longer believe that wolves become restless in January?(Excerpted from Debbie Reese's American Indians in Children's Literature, 4/2/09.)

The source of the so-called Wolf Moon:

Full Moon Names and Their MeaningsFull Moon names date back to Native Americans, of what is now the northern and eastern United States. The tribes kept track of the seasons by giving distinctive names to each recurring full Moon. Their names were applied to the entire month in which each occurred. There was some variation in the Moon names, but in general, the same ones were current throughout the Algonquin tribes from New England to Lake Superior. European settlers followed that custom and created some of their own names. Since the lunar month is only 29 days long on the average, the full Moon dates shift from year to year. Here is the Farmers Almanac's list of the full Moon names.

• Full Wolf Moon--January Amid the cold and deep snows of midwinter, the wolf packs howled hungrily outside Indian villages. Thus, the name for January's full Moon. Sometimes it was also referred to as the Old Moon, or the Moon After Yule. Some called it the Full Snow Moon, but most tribes applied that name to the next Moon.Comment:  The full-moon dates would shift all the way around the calendar unless you inserted a 13th lunar month. Which suggests a problem with these Anglicized moon months.

I'd have to question anything the Farmers Almanac claimed about the widespread use of Algonquin "Moon" names. But the claim could be true.

Author Penny Pollock could've made her book more authentic by researching these moons. Or at least by citing and quoting the Farmers Almanac's explanation.

For more on the subject, see The Best Indian Books.