Advent Calendar 6 - Joanna Cannan: More Ponies for Jean

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Joanna Cannan appears to be a fan of Christmas. Each Jean book covers Christmas, which provided the author with plenty of opportunity for comic invention. Tack shops are destroyed as people try and hide present buying, prices are left on presents, and the smug find out they have not done quite as well as they thought at Christmas present buying. In More Ponies for Jean, Jean has left school, and has started a riding school with her friend Judy.



Book three takes place during the war, and Jean goes out for a ride on Charity while everything is pitch black:

"When I got home, my father was rather annoyed with me for being out in the black-out. I spent the rest of the evening in my bedroom, wrapping up my Christmas presents and writing on them, and when I had finished and was tidying up a mountain of paper, which had torn or hadn't fitted, and washing the ink off the carpet with my sponge, I congratulated myself that this year I really was in good time for Christmas. It was only when I woke up in the middle of the night that I remembered I had forgotten to buy anything for my Cheltenham aunt, my Bath aunt, my London aunt, and my three cousins."

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